things like those?" But the boy did not seem to have been listening to
anything except his own angry thoughts. All his sun-browned young face
was flooded with red; he had run his fingers through his hair till it
stood up fiercely.

"They needn't trouble themselves 'bout me, nor you needn't, nor anybody
needn't!" he declaimed loudly. "Anybody'd think they were saints
themselves!"

"And _I_ was a saint and everybody was saints!" laughed Loraine
softly. But Jane Cotton's Sam did not laugh. He went striding away into
the woods, his head flung up high. Loraine and the little dead fish were
left behind. Oddly the girl was not thinking of the boy's rudeness in
return for her kind offer of help, but of the flash of spirit in his
eyes. It augured well for him, she was thinking, for spirit was spirit,
although "gone wrong." In the right place, it should spur him on to a
second attempt to get into college. What if she were to persist in her
offer--were to work with him, urge him to work with her?

But he had chosen to spurn her advances. She shook her head sadly. On
his own head be it. She turned her attention to the little dead fish.

"You poor dear, you look so dead and forlorn--what am I going to do with
you? Someway you've got to go home with me and be fried." She took him
up gingerly, but dropped him again--he was so slippery and damp! Wrap
him in her handkerchief? But she had no pocket and she could never,
never carry him in her sleeve which she had adopted as a pocket. So then
she must leave him, must she? Poor little useless sacrifice!

Back at the picnic spot the girls were waiting for her. They went home