rabbits and the squirrels--the latter of which ambled toward her in
the expectation of peanuts. She had no sort of concrete idea of what
she had expected to find: nor had she any kind of explanation of the
wave of sympathy that had come to her as clearly as though it had
been sent over an electric wire. All she knew was that she was out
of breath for no apparent reason, and on the verge of tears at
seeing no one there to meet her. Once before, on her sixth birth
day, the same call had been sent to her when she was playing alone
with her dolls in the semitropical garden of a hired house in
Florida, and she had started up and toddled round to the front and
found a large-eyed little girl peering through the gate. It was the
beginning of a close and blessed friendship.

This time, it seemed, the call had been meant for some other lonely
soul, and so she stood and looked with blurred eyes over the wide
valley that lay unrolled at her feet and, asked herself what she had
ever done to deserve to be left out of all the joy of life. From
somewhere near by the baying of hounds came, and from a farm to her
left the crowing of a cock; and then a twig snapped behind her, and
she turned eagerly.

"Oh, hello," said the boy.

"Oh, hello," she said.

He was not the hero of her dreams, by a long way. His hair didn't
curl; his nose was not particularly straight; nor were his eyes
large and magnetic. He was not something over six feet two; nor was
he dressed in wonderful clothes into which he might have been poured
in liquid form. He was a cheery, square-shouldered, good-natured