tudied the matter, his eyebrows pulled together, his
mouth wearing the expression which had disturbed Mary Hope when he
came to mend the lock on her door.

"I'd take--now, if your grandma has one that's all spotted, you might
take that, couldn't you? Then some days you'd love the yellow spots,
and some days you'd love the black spots, and some days--"

"Ooh! And I could call it _all_ the nice names I want to call it!" The
little girl pressed her hands together rapturously. "When my kitty's
got its yellow-spotty day, I'll call him Goldy, and when--"

The engine bell clanged warning, the wheels began slowly to turn.

"Ooh! You'll get left and have to walk!" cried the little girl, in
big-eyed alarm.

"All right, baby--you take the spotted one!" Lance called over his
shoulder as he ran. He was smiling when he swung up the steps. No
longer did he feel that he must kill the harsh-voiced man.

He went forward to his own section, sat down and stared out of the
window. As the memory of the little girl faded he drifted into
gloomily reviewing the things he had heard said of his family. Were
they really pariahs among their kind? Outlawed because of the blood
that flowed in their veins?

Away in the back of his mind, pushed there because the thought was not
pleasant, and because thinking could not make it pleasant, had been
the knowledge that he was returning to a life with which he no longer
seemed to be quite in tune. Two weeks had served to show him that he
had somehow drifted away from his father and Duke and Al, that he had
somehow come to look at life differently. He did not believe in the
harsh man's theory of their outlawry; yet he felt a reluctance toward
meeting again their silent measurement of himself, their intangible
aloofness.

The harsh-voiced man had dragged it all to the surface, roughly
sketching for the delectation of his friends the very things which
Lance had been deliberately covering from his own eyes. He had done
more. He had told things that made Lance wince. To humiliate Mary Hope
before the whole Black Rim, as they had done, to take away the piano
which he had wanted her to have--for that Lance could have throttled
his dad. It was like Tom to do it. Lance could not doubt that he had
done it. He could picture the whole wretchedly cheap retaliation for
the slight which Mary Hope had given them, and the picture tormented
him, made him writhe mentally. But he could picture also Mary Hope's
prim dis