"Oh," cried Christina, stopping short in sympathetic dismay, "oh, Gavin. What did you do?"
The boy looked up. He was holding his mouth in a tight line, manfully keeping back the misery his eyes could not hide. "I—I jist fell over them," he said with a desperate effort at nonchalance.
Christina put down her pail and tried to help. She had never liked Gavin Hume. He was a Scotch boy, whom old Skinflint Jenkins' folks had adopted from an Orphan Asylum. He was dirty and shy, and at school the girls laughed at him and the boys teased him. But to-day he was in trouble, and rumour had it that Gavin's life was one long period of trouble, for the Jenkinses were hard people.
"It's no use," declared Christina at last, examining the dreadful mess, and thinking of what her mother would do with it, "they're too dirty to use, Gavin. Never mind," she added comfortingly, "she won't scold, will she?"
The boy gave a half-contemptuous gesture. "Scold? I wouldn't care about that. He said he'd give me the horse-whip when I got home if it wasn't full."
Christina shuddered. "But you did fill it," she cried indignantly. "Won't he believe you?"
The boy looked at her as an old man might look at a prattling child. Gavin was only a couple of years older than Christina and no bigger, but there were ages of hardship in his experience, which her sheltered childhood could not know. But Christina's heart was always far in advance of her head, and it guessed much. That look told her volumes. Quick as a flash, she righted his pail, caught up her own, and tumbled its fresh rosy wealth into his, heaping it high.
"Oh, Christine! Oh, you mustn't!" The boy caught her hand to stop her, but Christina jerked away, and ran from him down the twisting green pathway. And as she ran she heard Mrs. Skinflint's terrible voice calling,
"Gav-in! Is that pail not full yet, you lazy lump?" and Gavin's prompt reply, "Yes'm. It's heapin'."
And that was some comfort to the homely young person who, with a pail only half full, and without prospect of either wealth or beauty, was wending her way down the green tangle of the berry patch. Somehow the comfort seemed to outweigh the misfortune. Gavin's escape from dire punishment gave her a feeling of exultation that even a pink satin ribbon would fail to produce.