“Emily isn’t here to-day, Pussy.”
“No,” said the other girl. “Emily has been a good girl, and worked hard; and she has finished her education, and gone home to keep house for her father.”
So Shireen did not stop so long to-day in the school as was her wont, for the chief attraction was gone. But she dispensed her favours among her friends freely enough before she went. And they were not all girls, either, whom Shireen regarded affectionately. For though it was a girls’ school, there were tiny, wee pests of fair-haired boys there, not an inch bigger, presumably, than the school tongs, and of one or two of these Shireen seemed very fond.
Down the room she trotted at last, however. She was not long in meeting with an adventure, for round the distant corner came Danger, the butcher’s bull-terrier. There wasn’t a good tree within fifty yards, so Shireen had a race for it. She got up into the sycamore safely, nevertheless. Danger coming in a good second, and stopping to bark savagely up at her.
Shireen raised her back and growled defiance down at him.
Then she taunted him.
“Why don’t you come up?” she cried derisively. “Why don’t you climb the tree? Because you can’t, clever though you think yourself. Fuss! Futt! Wouldn’t I make the fur fly out of you if you did come up. And wouldn’t I carve my name on your nose, just. Go home! Go home, you ugly brute. Mind, you’ll catch it when Cracker meets you. Oh, he’ll give it to you properly next time.”
The dog trotted off at last, and then Shireen came slowly down.
She meant to-day to pay all her other visits before going to Emily’s, because then she would have longer time to stay with her. So she went first to see Jeannie Lynch, at her mother’s tiny earthen-floored cottage. Jeannie’s mother was an invalid, and would never be better. But she could just sit by the fire in her high-backed chair, and do knitting, while Jeannie attended to the housewifery. Shireen found the girl busy washing up the dinner things, and singing low to herself. But there was a subdued, chastened kind of a look on her pretty face, which was habitual to it, for Jeannie was lame, and, I’m sorry to say, the village children teased her and called “Box-foot” after her. So even when she went out to do shopping for her mother, she limped along the street, looking fifty years of age, instead of the eleven summers that made up the sum total of her existence hitherto. She looked, indeed, as if she owed people an apology for her somewhat ungainly appearance.
Shireen loved her, nevertheless, and she loved Shireen, and it wasn’t for sake of the drop of milk Jeannie always put down for her, nor in the hope of catching the mouse that nibbled paper in the cupboard, that pussy always stopped at least an hour at this humble dwelling.