“Oh,” said Alexina, and stopped, and looked at the boy, uncomfortably immaculate in fresh white linen clothes, but he was absorbed in the flight of a bird across the rosy western sky.
“Come and play,” said the straightforward Alexina. Companionship was what she was in search of.
The boy, without looking at her, shook his head, not so much as if he meant no, but as if he did not know how to say yes.
Perhaps she divined this, for approaching the gate and fingering its hasp, she asked,
“Why?”
The boy, assuming a sort of passivity of countenance as for cover to shyness, kicked at the gate, then scowled as he twisted his neck within the stiff circle of his round collar with the combative air of one who wars against starch. “There’s nobody to play with,” he said; “they’ve all gone to the Sunday-school picnic. I don’t go to that church,” nodding in the direction of a brick structure down the street.
“You go to the same one as my Aunt Harriet and my uncle,” Alexina informed him. “I saw you there, and your name is William. I heard the lady calling you that, coming out.”
The gate which had swung in swung out again, bringing the boy nearer this outspoken little girl, whose unconsciousness was putting him more at his ease. He had seen her at church, too, but he could not have told her so.
“What’s the rest of your name—William what?”
Such a question makes a shy person very miserable, but the interest was pleasing.