She caught up with Janice within half a block laughing and skipping. Never had Janice seen Amy so light-hearted. Even the thought that she could not go to the party at Stella Latham's house did not serve to make Amy sorrowful for long. And Janice guessed why.
Amy Carringford had been hungry for a close friend. Perhaps
Janice was starved, too, for such companionship. At any rate,
Amy responded to Janice's friendliness just as a sunflower
responds to the orb of the day and turns toward it.
The two girls went on quite merrily toward the Day cottage at Eight Hundred and Forty-five Knight Street. There was plenty to chatter about without even touching on the coming party. Janice had plans about that.
When the two came in sight of the Day house those plans —and almost everything else—went out of Janice's head. There was a high, dusty, empty rubbish cart standing before the side gate of the Day premises; and from the porch a man in the usual khaki uniform of the Highway Department was bringing out a black oilcloth bag which Janice very well remembered.
"Oh, dear me! what can have happened?" Janice cried starting to run. "That is Delia's bag—the very one she brought with her."
She arrived at the gate just as the man came through the opening. He was a dusty-faced man, with a bristling mustache, and great, overhanging brows. He looked very angry, too.
"Oh, what is the matter?" asked Janice, as the man pitched the oilcloth bag into the cart, and turned back toward the house again.
But he was not regarding at all the girl or her chum who then ran up. He turned to bellow in through the open door:
"Hi! Come out o' that, Biddy Burns! Ye poor innocent! Sure, with your two little children home cryin' all day alone and me at work, ye should be ashamed of yerself, me gur-rl! If I was the kind of a feyther ye nade, I'd be wearin' a hairbrush out on ye, big and old as ye be. Come out o' that—or will I come in afther ye?"
"Mercy me!" gasped Amy.