"Get a Riley cut. I don't know but I'd better be shaved."
"Oh, Neale! you'll look so funny," giggled Agnes, suddenly becoming hysterical.
"That's all right. You have a right to laugh," said Neale, as Agnes fell back upon a box to have her laugh out. "But I won't be any funnier looking with no hair than I would be with green hair—make up your mind to that."
Neale slipped over the back fence into Mr. Murphy's premises, before the rest of the Kenway family came home, and the girls did not see him again that day.
"How the folks stared at us!" Ruth said, shaking her head. "It would have been all right if you hadn't gotten up and gone out with him, Aggie."
"Oh, yes! let that horrid old Deacon Abel put him out of church just as though he were a stray dog, and belonged to nobody!" cried Agnes.
"Well, he doesn't belong to us, does he?" asked Dot, wonderingly.
"We're the only folks he has, I guess, Dot," said Tess, as Agnes went off with her head in the air.
"He has Mr. Murphy—and the pig," said Dot, slowly. "But I like Neale. Only I wish he hadn't painted his hair so funny."
"I'd like to have boxed his ears—that I would!" said Mrs. MacCall, in vexation. "I thought gals was crazy enough nowadays; but to think of a boy dyeing his hair!"