CHAPTER IV: THE SECOND DAY


It had rained all that night, but the second morning dawned the
twinklingest kind of day. It seemed to Maida that Mother Nature had
washed a million tiny, fleecy, white clouds and hung them out to dry
in the crisp blue air. Everything still dripped but the brilliant
sunshine put a sparkle on the whole world. Slates of old roofs
glistened, brasses of old doors glittered, silver of old name-plates
shone. Curbstones, sidewalks, doorsteps glimmered and gleamed. The
wet, ebony-black trunks of the maples smoked as if they were afire,
their thick-leaved, golden heads flared like burning torches. Maida
stood for a long time at the window listening to a parrot who called
at intervals from somewhere in the neighborhood. “Get up, you
sleepy-heads! Get up! Get up!”

A huge puddle stretched across Primrose Court. When Maida took her
place in the swivel-chair, three children had begun already to float
shingles across its muddy expanse. Two of them were Molly and Tim
Doyle, the third a little girl whom Maida did not know. For a time
she watched them, fascinated. But, presently, the school children
crowding into the shop took all her attention. After the bell rang
and the neighborhood had become quiet again, she resumed her watch
of the mud-puddle fun.

Now they were loading their shingles with leaves, twigs, pebbles,
anything that they could find in the gutters. By lashing the water
into waves, as they trotted in the wake of their frail craft, they
managed to sail them from one end of the puddle to the other. Maida
followed the progress of these merchant vessels as breathlessly as