"Now don't you mind 'em!" whispered a kindly old lady to the Scollards. "They don't mean nothin' hard—they're kinder making fun of your girl, but they don't mean nothin'!"
Mrs. Scollard smiled back, though a trifle tremulously. "It's hard on the child—she took it all so seriously—but she needs being laughed at; I'm glad they are laughing. And they are not unkind. She deserves a lesson for being so conceited with her elders! Please tell everybody the child did not consult us, we did not help her with this, and that we are grateful to Crestville for the way it is teaching her a few important facts."
For a few moments Laura stood facing her mocking audience, now turned entertainers in her stead. She could not grasp what had happened. At last the truth dawned upon her that she, Laura, the gifted, was being ridiculed, handled with no respect for her talents, nor for her social superiority.
When she realized this painful fact, she turned as white as a little ghost, and fled from the church, the laughter of her audience following her down the road as she ran towards home.
[CHAPTER XIII]
HUMILITY, CALVES AND GINGER POP
Mrs. Scollard lost no time in following Laura from her Waterloo. She and Happie hurried out of the chapel and down the road, leaving the Ark boys to carry out their hastily-laid plan of helping the Crestville boys to turn the occasion which Laura had meant should be so improving into an old-fashioned frolic, worthy the Day We Celebrate. But though Mrs. Scollard and Happie made their best pace down the road, Laura was nowhere in sight all the way, and when they reached the house there was still no trace of her. A window was open into the kitchen; if she were in the house, Laura must have climbed in that way, for her mother and Miss Bradbury had both keys.
Mrs. Scollard put hers into the lock with many misgivings. Her heart smote her for having let Laura go on to certain defeat; it might be—it would be—good for her in the end, but it was hard for the mother to give over the foolish child to discipline, and she yearned over her in her present mortification which must be cruelly hard to bear.
Inside the house everything was dark and quiet. Mrs. Scollard and Happie called Laura, but there was no reply.