tood
the only apricot tree in Saint X. As few of us had tasted apricots,
and as those few pronounced them better far than oranges or even
bananas, that tree was the climax of tantalization.

The place had belonged to a childless old couple who hated children--or
did they bar them out and drive them away because the sight and sound
of them quickened the ache of empty old age into a pain too keen to
bear? The husband died, the widow went away to her old maid sister at
Madison; and the Gardiners, coming from Cincinnati to live in the town
where Colonel Gardiner was born and had spent his youth, bought the
place. On our way to and from school in the first weeks of that term,
pausing as always to gaze in through the iron gates of the drive, we
had each day seen Pauline walking alone among the flowers. And she
would stop and smile at us; but she was apparently too shy to come to
the gates; and we, with the memory of the cross old couple awing us,
dared not attempt to make friends with her.

She was eight years old, tall for her age, slender but strong,
naturally graceful. Her hazel eyes were always dancing mischievously.
She liked boys' games better than girls'. In her second week she
induced several of the more daring girls to go with her to the pond
below town and there engage in a raft-race with the boys. And when
John Dumont, seeing that the girls' raft was about to win, thrust the
one he was piloting into it and upset it, she was the only girl who did
not scream at the shock of the sudden tumble into the water or rise in
tears from the shallow, muddy bottom.

She tried going barefooted; she was always getting bruised or cut in
attempts--usually successful--at boys' recklessness; yet her voice was
sweet and her manner toward others, gentle. She hid her face when Miss
Stone whipped any one--more fearful far than the rise and fall of Miss
Stone's ferule was the soaring and sinking of her broad, bristling
eyebrows.

From the outset John Dumont took especial delight in teasing her--John
Dumont, the roughest boy in the school. He was seven years older than
she, but was only in the Fourth Reader--a laggard in his studies
because his mind was incurious about books and the like, was absorbed
in games, in playing soldier and robber, in swimming and sledding, in
orchard-looting and fighting. He was impudent and domineering, a bully
but not a coward, good-natured when deferred to, the feared leader of a
boisterous, im