The picture she drew was too much for Mrs. Law’s tender heart, and she said: “You may keep it for a few days anyhow, and in the meantime perhaps we will be able to find a better home for it.”
Cassy smiled through her tears, but she sat looking very soberly at the small animal.
“I saw some wicked, wicked girls, one day, mother,” she said presently; “girls, not boys,—and they were swinging a poor little kitten around by one paw, and then they would let it go up into the air and fall down on the ground as if it had no feeling, but some lady came along and made them stop, and she carried the kitten away with her. I was so glad she did, and I wanted, oh I did want to take those girls up to some high place and do the same thing to them as they were doing to the kitten; I wonder how they would like it.” There was a vindictive expression on Cassy’s face that her mother did not like to see.
“Why Cassy,” she said gently, “you must not be so spiteful; that would be doing as wickedly as the girls did, and you would know better, whereas they probably did not think they were hurting the kitten; I doubt if any one had ever told them that it would hurt a cat to do that to it, though it would not hurt a doll.”
“I can’t help it,” persisted Cassy; “they were wicked and they ought to be punished, and I would like to be the one to do it.” She now had the puppy in her lap, the comfort of which seemed to appeal to the little thing, for it snuggled down comfortably. “It is so cunning,” Cassy murmured in a soft voice very unlike the one she had just used. “See, Jerry, it is going to sleep.”
If anything, Jerry was the more interested of the two, for had he not snatched him from a dreadful fate? And the two children vied with each other in paying this new member of the family such attentions as they could.
With her flowers and the puppy Cassy was very happy for the next few days. The existence of that garden, too, which she might expect once in a while to visit, was another source of delight, and though she generally had kept more or less aloof from her school-fellows, she now did so more than ever. Very often they would pass her sitting in some corner at recess, and she would hear them say: “There’s Miss Oddity. I wonder what she’s mooning about now.”
“Snakes or spiders, or some old thing like that,” she once heard the answer come, and she smiled to herself. They were never able to get over the fact that she was not afraid of mice, and that once she had spent the whole of her recess watching a colony of ants.
“What do you suppose Cassy Law has been doing?” one of the girls said to the teacher who had come out to watch the class as they returned to the school-room.
“What?” asked Miss Adams sharply, keen to discover some misdemeanor.