nnocent wonder; her pretty mouth drooped
anxiously at the corners. Jerome knew her well enough, although he
had never before exchanged a word with her. She was little Lucina
Merritt, whose father had money and bought her everything she wanted,
and whose mother rigged her up like a puppet, as he had heard his
mother say.

"No, ain't sick," he said, in a half-intelligible grunt. A cross
little animal poked into wakefulness in the midst of its nap in the
sun might have responded in much the same way. Gallantry had not yet
developed in Jerome. He saw in this pretty little girl only another
child, and, moreover, one finely shod and clothed, while he went
shoeless and threadbare. He looked sulkily at her blue silk hood,
pulled his old cap down with a twitch to his black brows, and
shrugged himself closer to the warm rock.

The little girl eyed his bare toes. "Be you cold?" she ventured.

"No, ain't cold," grunted Jerome. Then he caught sight of something
in her hand--a great square of sugar-gingerbread, out of which she
had taken only three dainty bites as she came along, and in spite of
himself there was a hungry flash of his black eyes.

Lucina held out the gingerbread. "I'd just as lives as not you had
it," said she, timidly. "It's most all there. I've just had three
teenty bites."

Jerome turned on her fiercely. "Don't want your old gingerbread," he
cried. "Ain't hungry--have all I want to home."

The little Lucina jumped, and her blue eyes filled with tears. She
turned away without a word, and ran falteringly, as if she could not
see for tears, across the field; and there was a white lamb trotting
after her. It had appeared from somewhere in the fields, and Jerome
had not noticed it. He remembered hearing that Lucina Merritt had a
cosset lamb that followed her everywhere. "Has everything," he
muttered--"lambs an' everything. Don't want your old gingerbread."

Suddenly he sprang up and began feeling in his pocket; then he ran
like a deer after the little girl. She rolled her frightened, tearful
blue eyes over her shoulder at him, and began to run too, and the
cosset lamb cantered faster at her heels; but Jerome soon gained on
them.

"Stop, can't ye?" he sang out. "Ain't goin' to hurt ye. What ye
'fraid of?" He laid his hand on her green-shawled shoulders, and she
stood panting, her little face looking up at him, half reassured,
half terrified, from her blue silk hood-frills and her curls.

"Like sas'fras?" in