Sally, waving her Sunday handkerchief, craned her neck for a last sight of those blue-and-white-ginghamed little girls, the only playmates and friends she had in the world. There were tears in her eyes, and, queerly, for she thought she hated the Home, a stab of homesickness shooting through her heart. How safe they were, there in the playground pen! How simple and sheltered life was in the Home, after all! Suddenly she knew, somehow, that it was the last time she would ever see it, or the children.
Without a thought for the iron-clad “Keep off the grass” rule, Sally turned and ran, fleetly, her little figure as graceful as a fawn’s, over the thick velvet carpet of the lawn. When she reached the high fence that separated her from the other orphans, she spread her arms, as if she would take them all into her embrace.
“Don’t forget me, kids!” she panted, her voice thick with tears. “I—I want to tell you I love you all, and I’m sorry for every mean thing I ever did to any of you, and I hope you all get adopted by rich papas and mamas and have ice cream every day! Goodby, kids! Goodby!”
“Kiss me goodby, Sal-lee!” a little whining voice pleaded.
Sally stooped and pressed her lips, through the fence opening, against the babyish mouth of little Eloise Durant, the newest and most forlorn orphan of them all.
“Me, too, Sal-lee! Me, too! We won’t have nobody to play-act for us now!” Betsy wailed, pressing her tear-stained face against the wire.
CHAPTER II
A little later, when Sally was seated primly beside Clem Carson, jolting rapidly down the road that led past the orphanage toward the business district of the city, the farmer nudged her in the ribs and chuckled:
“You’re quite a kissing-bug, ain’t you, Sally? How about a little kiss for your new boss?”
Sally had shrunk as far away from Clem Carson as the seat of the “flivver” permitted, phrases from Mrs. Stone’s embarrassed, vague, terrifying warnings boiling and churning in her mind: “Keep your body pure”—“mustn’t let men take any liberties with you”—“you’re a big girl now, things you ought to know”—“if you’re led astray, it will be due to evils in your own nature”—