"The little girl does not understand, Israel, little son," she said. "Hold her hand carefully, and take her back to her own gate. I will wait for you here."
Emmy Lou, bewildered as she was led along, endeavored to understand.
"It isn't Sunday school?" she asked Izzy.
His face was no longer alight, only gentle and, like his mother's, patient. "Not yours. I thought it was. Mine and my mother's and my father's."
Little girls left at their own gates, little girls who have come to live at their aunties' home, go around by the side way to the kitchen door. Emmy Lou had learned that already. If anyone had missed her there was no evidence of it. Aunt M'randy, just emerging from this kitchen door, a coal-bucket heaped with ashes in her hand, as Emmy Lou arrived there, paused in her rolling gait, and invited her to go.
Where? Emmy Lou in her little sacque and her round hat hadn't an idea, but seeing that she was expected to accept, took Aunt M'randy's unoccupied hand and went.
And so it was that she found Sister. For Aunt M'randy was going down the length of the back yard, a nice yard with a tree and a bush and what, palpably in a milder hour had been flowers in a border, to the alley-gate to empty the ashes. And beyond this alley gate, outside which stood the barrel they were seeking, in the alley itself, with the cottage shanties of the alley world for background, stood Sister! One knew she was Sister because Aunt M'randy called her so.
Sister was small and brown and solid. Small enough to be littler than Emmy Lou. Her face was serious and her eyes in their setting of generous white followed one wonderingly.
Littler than Emmy Lou! The rule in life was extending itself. Hitherto she, Emmy Lou, had been that littler one, and hers the eyes to follow wonderingly, and the effect of meeting one thus littler than oneself is to experience strange joys, palpably and patently peculiar to being the larger.
Emmy Lou dropped the hand of Aunt M'randy and went out into the alley and straight to Sister.