you last week. Finally you promised
me that you would pay strict attention. What have you to say for
yourself?"

He shot her a half-frightened glance and found her face seemingly stern
and remorseless. He had been tempted to explain how the great
out-of-doors called to him with an insistence which was irresistible,
but shucks, she wouldn't understand. How was he to know that under the
surface of it all, she sympathized with the culprit daydreamer
exceedingly? So he hung his head in silence.

There was a knock at the door. Miss Brown dismissed him with a curt nod.
He sank thankfully into his desk as Sid DuPree sprang forward to admit
the newcomer--a new girl and her mother. From the shelter of his big
geography, John surveyed the couple with that calmly critical stare
which only a ten-year-old is master of.

The mother was nice, he decided. Fat ones always were. It was your long,
thin woman who made trouble. Look at old lady Meeker, who lived next the
vacant lot on Southern Avenue, where the boys gathered occasionally on
their way from school for a game of marbles or to play split-top on one
of the loose, decayed fence planks. Never did a glassy go spinning from
the big dirt ring through a dexterous shot, or a soft, evenly grained
top split cleanly to the spear head amid the proper shouts of approval
than her fretful, piercing voice put an end to further fun. Such
goings-on made her head ache, she averred time and again. If they didn't
leave immediately, she'd telephone the police station. Once she had said
it was a "wonder some parents wouldn't keep their children in their own
back yards." She forgot that half the gang lived in apartment buildings
with back yards only designed for clothes-drying apparatus, and that the
other half lived in houses built upon so cramped an acreage that the
yards were no fun to play in. But grown-ups were in the habit of
committing such oversights--especially the skinny, cranky ones.

As for the little girl--ah! she was good to look upon.

Her chestnut hair hung in curly ringlets below her shoulders, almost to
the waist of her little white frock. Her face held a slight pallor which
was strangely fascinating to the sun-tanned urchin, and her eyes were a
deep, rich brown. As the conversation ended between teacher and parent,
she left the platform and walked to the front seat assigned her in a
timid, shrinking way which stamped her as just the sort of a girl the
fellows would make miserab