g quickly. As the wall
was not very high, Alene idly wondered why such an active-looking girl
should need assistance in scaling it.

"Why, I never dreamed she was lame," she murmured a moment later,
swallowing something that seemed to choke her, when she saw Ivy coming
forward on a pair of slender crutches. She strove to hide her emotion
as she hurried down the grassy terrace to greet her.

Ivy may have noticed her start of surprise, for she said with a queer,
unchildish laugh, as though she had read her thought:

"You didn't know I used these," with an expressive glance toward the
crutches. "You see I kept 'em on the other side of the wall the other
day. I wanted you to treat me as you would if I were like the rest,
not handled gently and pitied!"

Alene tried to keep the pity from her countenance, for Ivy's words made
her feel worse than ever. She wished she could run away somewhere, for
a while, to have a good cry.

"Don't mind her, Alene! I do believe she talks that way to make us
feel bad," said Laura in what Alene thought a very unfeeling manner;
but she learned later that Laura's seeming harshness toward Ivy was
only a cloak to hide her sympathy, and that it gave her an influence
over the child who would otherwise use her infirmity to tyrannize over
the others.

Ivy threw her crutches on the grass and sank down, saying,

"Horrid things! I hate them--and it makes me feel so mean to have to
beg to get them back when the kids take 'em away from me!"

"Do they do that?" inquired Alene, indignantly.

"They have to do it sometimes, for she beats them with the crutches,"
explained Laura.

"That's the only way I can reach 'em!" said her friend, in self-defense.

Ivy was an elfin-looking creature with sparkling black eyes that seemed
to see right through one; her small head was covered with a thick mop
of curls of a blackness that, in some lights, had blue and green shades
like the plumage of a bird; her wasted cheeks and brown, claw-like
hands told pathetically of weary months on a sick-bed, which indeed she
had only recently quitted, as Alene learned later.

"What a lovely sash you have on," she exclaimed, with a sudden change
of mood, holding up an end of Alene's plaid sash. "It's like a baby
rainbow stolen from a fairy sky and hung 'round your waist."

Alene glanced at her sash with a new interest. She cared little for
pretty clothes and seldom noticed what those around her wore; that she
was