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she had struck! Her hand tingled from it yet. It must have hurt poor
Charles Stuart dreadfully, and after such conduct she could never hope
to be a lady. Her aunt would be disgraced, and that wonderful lady,
whose name she bore, would never come to see her. She was an outcast
whom nobody loved, for not even Mother MacAllister could like her now!

She could not go home, so she flung herself down upon the wet grass in
a corner of the lane and wept bitterly. It was always so with
Elizabeth. She was up in the clouds one moment and down in the depths
the next. Her heart was breaking over the injury she had done. For
the first time in her life she experienced a feeling of warm regard
towards Charles Stuart, simply because she had hurt him.

She stopped sobbing, and, raising herself from the ground, peeped out
through her tears to see if he were in sight. Perhaps he was stunned
by the blow and was lying beneath the gate. She could see no sign of
him and her heart stood still with dread. She had been vaguely
conscious of joyous shouts and cries from the field behind the house
and had heard the rifle-crack of a baseball against the bat, telling
that there was a game in progress. She was now made aware that the
joyous shouts were growing into a noisy clamor of welcome. Above the
din she could hear John's roar: "Charles Stuart on our side! I bar
Charles Stuart!" And there was her false lover speeding across the
field towards her home, Trip at his heels! Elizabeth arose from the
ground, dry-eyed and indignant. She wished she had hit him harder.
Charles Stuart MacAllister was without doubt the horridest, horridest
boy that ever lived and she would never speak to him again--no, not if
she lived to be two hundred and went over to his place every Saturday
for a thousand years. Just see if she would!

As she passed an alder clump and caught a glimpse of her aunt standing
near the garden gate talking with Mr. Coulson, Elizabeth became
suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of her shoeless and disheveled
condition. She knew that, while untidy hair and a dirty pinafore were
extremely reprehensible, bare feet put one quite beyond the possibility
of being genteel. That word "genteel" had become the shibboleth of the
Gordon family in the last four years. It was poor Elizabeth's chief
burden in life. For how could anyone hope to live up to it when she
was possessed of a wild streak?

Fortunately, her aunt was in deep con