“Do you like living in that funny place?” asked Catherine, as the three little girls walked down the lane which led to the road they were to take.
“Why, it’s the nicest house I ever lived in!” Elizabeth Ann said enthusiastically. “Doris is crazy about it—aren’t you, Doris? We go up and down ladders instead of stairs, and we sleep in bunks instead of beds. And the roof is a deck, and it’s the nicest place to play you ever saw.”
“Yes it is,” declared Doris, forgetting her shyness. “And Elizabeth Ann can tell ship-time—she learns everything.”
“Oh, Doris, I only know a little bit about it,” Elizabeth Ann protested, turning red. “I have to stop and count, and most of the time I get it all wrong.”
Catherine did not seem to be listening. She was peering down the road.
“Here comes that awful Roger Calendar,” she said crossly. “It will be just like him to try to walk with us; don’t pay any attention to him and maybe he’ll let us alone.”
Now Doris might have done as Catherine asked—Doris was apt to do whatever anyone asked of her. But Elizabeth Ann liked to do her own thinking, and she remembered what Uncle Hiram had said about Roger.
“I think he is a nice boy,” said Elizabeth Ann, “and I mean to speak to him. He lives on the farm next to us; Uncle Hiram said so.”
“He only lives with the Bostwicks who own the farm,” said Catherine scornfully. “Roger is a taken boy—didn’t you hear me tell you that yesterday? He used to live at the poor farm, until the Bostwicks took him. He works for them, and the only reason they send him to school is because the Board of Education makes them.”
Roger was waiting at the Bostwick mailbox as they came up to him. He did not seem to notice that Catherine looked straight and pretended not to see him.