y. "But she ain't what I'd call playful."

"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed
sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always
have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"

"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the
treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all
wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to
the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel
tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and
carrots.

Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel
bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six
short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung
upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.

The shy, quick-darting creature--half child and half humming bird--was
forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After
a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never
penetrate, she managed to bump her responsibility out into the orchard.
But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under
her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant
imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of
Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering
mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a
heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes
plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.

"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the
gift of God would make aimless pugilistic passes at her interlocutor.

"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground.
Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in
a red dress?"

Theodora, after some space spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a
cheerful acquiescence.

"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as
anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right
now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."

Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary
would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged
appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But
the