"Look!" cried one breathlessly. "We found 'em in the hollow. And Nance says if you'll let her, she'll take us next Saturday to the old mill where some yellow vi'lets grow!"
Miss Stanley looked down at the flushed, happy faces; then she put her arm around Nance's shoulder.
"Nancy will not be with us next Saturday," she said regretfully. "She's going home."
CHAPTER XII
CLARKE'S
Nance Molloy came out of Forest Home, an independent, efficient girl, with clear skin, luminous blue eyes, and shining braids of fair hair. She came full of ideals and new standards and all the terrible wisdom of sixteen, and she dumped them in a mass on the family in Calvary Alley and boldly announced that "what she was going to do was a-plenty!"
But like most reformers, she reckoned too confidently on cooperation. The rest of the Snawdor family had not been to reform school, and it had strong objections to Nance's drastic measures. Her innovations met with bitter opposition from William J., who indignantly declined to have the hitherto respected privacy of his ears and nose invaded, to Mrs. Snawdor, who refused absolutely to sleep with the windows open.
"What's the sense in working your fingers off to buy coal to heat the house if you go an' let out all the hot air over night?" she demanded. "They've filled up yer head with fool notions, but I tell you right now, you ain't goin' to work 'em off on us. You kin just tell that old maid Stanley that when she's had three husbands and five children an' a step, an' managed to live on less'n ten dollars a week, it'll be time enough fer her to be learnin' me tricks!"
"But don't all this mess ever get on your nerves? Don't you ever want to clear out and go to the country?" asked Nance.
"Not me!" said Mrs. Snawdor. "I been fightin' the country all my life. It's bad enough bein' dirt pore, without goin' an' settin' down among the stumps where there ain't nothin' to take yer mind off it."