and
fell! As I went, I curled like a squirrel around Julie, and when I
struck, she was still in my grasp and on top of me. But she rolled
out of my relaxing clutch after that, and when father and mother came
running, she was lying on the stones. They thought she had fallen that
way, and as the breath had been fairly knocked out of her little body,
so that she was not crying, they were more frightened than ever, and ran
with her to the house, wild with apprehension.

As for me, I got up somehow and followed. I decided no bones were broken,
but I was dizzy and faint, and aching from bruises. I saw my little
friends running down the plank and making off along the poplar drive,
white-faced and panting. I knew they thought Julie was dead and that I'd
be hung. I had the same idea.

When we got to the sitting-room I had a strange feeling of never having
seen it before. The tall stove, the green and oak ingrain carpet, the
green rep chairs, the what-not with its shells, the steel engravings
on the walls, seemed absolutely strange. I sat down and counted the
diamond-shaped figures on the oilcloth in front of the stove; and after
a long time I heard Julie cry, and mother say with immeasurable relief:

"Aside from a shaking up, I don't believe she's a bit the worse."

Then some one brought me a cupful of cold water and asked me if I was
hurt. I shook my head and would not speak. I then heard, in simple and
emphatic Anglo-Saxon the opinions of my father and mother about a girl
who would put her little sister's life in danger, and would disobey her
parents. And after that I was put in my mother's bedroom to pass the
rest of the day, and was told I needn't expect to come to the table with
the others.

I accepted my fate stoically, and being permitted to carry my own chair
into the room, I put it by the western window, which looked across two
miles of meadows waving in buckwheat, in clover and grass, and sat
there in a curious torpor of spirit. I was glad to be alone, for I had
discovered a new idea--the idea of sin. I wished to be left to myself
till I could think out what it meant. I believed I could do that by
night, and, after I had got to the root of the matter, I could cast the
whole ugly thing out of my soul and be good all the rest of my life.

There was a large upholstered chair standing in front of me, and I put
my head down on the seat of that and thought and thought. My thoughts
reached so far that I grew frightened,