CHAPTER VII

Father is coming to-morrow! I am so excited and happy that to-day,
after I was safely out of Twickenham Town and there was no one to see
me, I stood up on Skylark's back and held the bridle with one hand and
waved the other in the air; and then I tried standing on one foot with
the other one out, but I came near losing my balance and just did catch
myself in time. Seeing a woman coming down the road in a buggy, with a
baby in her lap, I got back in place before she saw what I was doing,
but I needn't have done it, for it was just Mrs. Pettigrew, and she
wouldn't have cared whether it was my head or my heels which were on
the horse. She has eleven children and no husband to speak of, and
what people do or don't do doesn't bother her. We stopped for a little
talk and she told me about the roof leaking and the pig eating the
baby's bonnet which Miss Katie Spain had given it last Christmas, and
which was too small for its head, but was all it had; and that a kettle
of soft soap had fallen off the stove and burned two toes of Sammy, the
next to the youngest boy, and she would still be telling me things, but
I told her Father was coming and I had to attend to something, and so
she drove on.

I did have something to attend to, but I didn't attend right away, for
the day was so wonderful I couldn't go in for a long time. The
sunshine looked as if it had been washed and ironed, it was so clear
and clean and crisp, and the wind in the trees said all sorts of lovely
things to me, and I made up my mind that, no matter what happened in