Ivy may have noticed her start of surprise, for she said with a queer, unchildish laugh, as though she had read her thought:
"You didn't know I used these," with an expressive glance toward the crutches. "You see I kept 'em on the other side of the wall the other day. I wanted you to treat me as you would if I were like the rest, not handled gently and pitied!"
Alene tried to keep the pity from her countenance, for Ivy's words made her feel worse than ever. She wished she could run away somewhere, for a while, to have a good cry.
"Don't mind her, Alene! I do believe she talks that way to make us feel bad," said Laura in what Alene thought a very unfeeling manner; but she learned later that Laura's seeming harshness toward Ivy was only a cloak to hide her sympathy, and that it gave her an influence over the child who would otherwise use her infirmity to tyrannize over the others.
Ivy threw her crutches on the grass and sank down, saying,
"Horrid things! I hate them—and it makes me feel so mean to have to beg to get them back when the kids take 'em away from me!"
"Do they do that?" inquired Alene, indignantly.
"They have to do it sometimes, for she beats them with the crutches," explained Laura.
"That's the only way I can reach 'em!" said her friend, in self-defense.
Ivy was an elfin-looking creature with sparkling black eyes that seemed to see right through one; her small head was covered with a thick mop of curls of a blackness that, in some lights, had blue and green shades like the plumage of a bird; her wasted cheeks and brown, claw-like hands told pathetically of weary months on a sick-bed, which indeed she had only recently quitted, as Alene learned later.