"Couldn't you wait until morning?"
"No, dear, I have waited too long already," answered Tabitha, turning out the light and scrambling back into bed. "I had to tell him how good everyone is to me, and how good he is, too."
CHAPTER XIX
A STRIKE!
The weeks vanished all too quickly to suit the black-eyed maid from the desert, and she often found herself wondering where the time went to, for before she realized it, winter had slipped away and spring was nearly gone. Now May was half over, and in another month school would be closed for the summer. Carrie was to spend her vacation on the Oregon farm with her grandmother, and Tabitha must return to the desert alone. She sat swinging idly under the pepper trees, her Latin grammar on her knees, but with eyes staring off across the smooth lawn and beautiful shrubbery, thinking mournfully of the long, hot weeks on the burning desert before September would come again.
"I have hardly had a chance to say a word to Carrie all this year, and now after counting on three months alone with her in Silver Bow, she is going away for her vacation. That is always the way things happen with me. Some people have everything and others nothing." Half unconsciously she began to hum the tune Mrs. Vane had composed for The Discontented Buttercup; then realizing what she was singing, she laughed.
"Now aren't you ashamed of yourself, Tabitha Catt?" she exclaimed aloud. "When you have the chance to go to boarding school and get an education, and make so many beautiful friendships and have everything so perfectly lovely, here you are envying Carrie because she is going to her grandmother's for vacation. She isn't well, and it wouldn't be good for her to go back to the desert for the hot summer months. Besides, you promised to be good and not to envy people any more. You are a discontented buttercup.
'Look bravely up into the sky,
And be content with knowing
That God wished for a buttercup
Just here, where you are growing.'"