"My mother didn't think so," Val said, feeling her throat swell.
"But I am your grandmother, you see."
She had lowered her chin again; her eyes were shooting out over her spectacles, her eyebrows terrifically high. This grandmother of hers could move her eyebrows about as easily as other people moved their arms and legs. It was a fearsome accomplishment.
"In my house," she went on, after the awful pause, "the thing to be considered is what I think. Among other matters I consider your way of entering a room might be improved. Now, you may see how quietly you can go out."
Seldom has a child been more surprised at an unexpected turn in affairs than was this one when she found herself on the outside of the door. She stood irresolute a moment. Why had she obeyed? She gritted her little white teeth in self-contempt. Should she go back? There were loads of things she had forgot to say. The idea of being sent out like that! She went slowly up-stairs and angrily tumbled some of her clothes out of her trunk. There were three cookies, a cruller, and some chocolates in a box near the bottom. Oh, wise precaution of provident childhood! Still, her present lot was a most unhappy one.
"No breakfast! How angry my poor sainted mother would be!" She shed two tears. "No mother, no coffee, nothing but a cruel grandmother."
She revelled gloomily in the tragic picture till she heard Emmie coming up-stairs. She hid the "remainder biscuit" and hurriedly dried her eyes. There had long been a theory in the family—even her mother had shared it—that Val never cried, and hadn't any heart to speak of. She was intensely proud of this reputation for stoicism, and wouldn't for worlds have undeceived any one. She brushed past Emmie now with lofty looks and ran down-stairs and out-of-doors. She ranged about the grounds, finding that her father was right—there were great possibilities of enjoyment in these neglected haunts. She was not long in discovering the grape-vine climbing the pear-tree in the wilderness, and satisfying herself that "peaches were ripe." The osage orange-trees that grew along the fence behind the drying-ground had dropped their rugged globes on the grass, and one could play ball with these oranges till their tough fibres grew soft and yielded grudgingly, like rubber. Presently one that she had sent flying over the trees into the adjoining grounds came mysteriously back. Val parted the fringe of lower undergrowth and peered between the fence rails, but could see no one. She shied another orange, and this time she saw a boy dart out from behind a tree and send the orange swiftly through the sunshine over her head. Val leaped up, and by a fluke caught it firmly in her hands.
"Hooray!" came involuntarily from the next-door neighbor; and they went on playing ball in ambush till curiosity prevailed over shyness.
When the next-door neighbor drew near the osage barrier, he revealed himself as a boy about Val's age, with a freckled face and a queer little knob of a nose.