They kept on ringing the bell. They did not know what to do. They were afraid to go back and tell Miss Lizzie, so they went around the side. It was a narrow, paved court between the house and the high board fence. It was dark. They held each other’s hands.
There was a window. Someone tapped. It was a lady—a pretty lady. There was a flower in her hair—an artificial flower. She nodded to them. She smiled. She laughed. Then she put her finger on her lips. Emmy Lou and Rosalie did not know what to do.
The lady pointed to her throat and then to Rosalie. It seemed as if it were the blue locket on the golden chain she wanted.
Then someone came. It was an old woman. It was the servant Miss Lizzie had said would come to the door. She came from the front. She had been away somewhere.
She looked cross. She told them to go around to the front door. As they went the lady tapped. Rosalie looked back. Rosalie said the lady had pulled the flower from her hair and was tearing it to pieces.
The old woman brought the trial-paper. She told them not to mention coming around in the court, and not to say they had had to wait.
It was strange. But many things are strange when one is ten. One learns to put many strange things aside.
There were more worrisome things nearer. The screw was loose which secured the iron foot of Emmy Lou’s desk to the floor. Now the front of one desk formed the seat to the next.
Muscles, even in the atmosphere of a Miss Lizzie’s rigid discipline, sometimes rebel. The little girl sitting in front of Emmy Lou was given to spasmodic changes of posture, causing unexpected upheavals of Emmy Lou’s desk.
On one of these occasions Emmy Lou’s ink bottle went over. It was Copy-Book hour. That one’s apron, beautiful with much fine ruffling, should be ruined, was a small matter when one’s trial-paper had been straight in the path of the flood. Neither was Emmy Lou’s condition of digital helplessness to be thought of, although it did seem as if all great Neptune’s ocean and more might be needed to make those little fingers white again. Sponges, slate-rags, and neighbourly solicitude did what they could. But the trial-paper was steeped indelibly past redemption.