The boy's face darkened.

"Hasn't your shawl got out of pawn yet?"

"How should it?"

He flung himself angrily out of the broken chair, picked up his ragged
cap, and strode angrily and noisily across the room, out at the door,
stumbling up the steps, like one half-blind with disgust or rage, and
went on swift feet down the street out of sight. And Mart, poor Mart,
left thus to solitude, let the last beam of the sun go without watching,
and buried her face in the ragged quilt and cried.




CHAPTER IV.

"I DON'T BLAME THEM."


It was not a "pet" name. Poor Mart Colson would not have known what to
do with a pet name. Her life had not taught her how to use such phrases;
how she came to be named Martha, she did not know; but a hollow-eyed,
sad-voiced woman could have told her of a country home, long ago, where
there were daffodils blowing in the early spring, almost under the snow;
where, later, the earth was turned into sky, or the stars came down and
gleamed all over her father's fields, so plentiful were the dandelions;
and the breath of the clover came in at all the open windows, and the
cows--her father's cows--coming home from pasture, and the tinkle of