CHAPTER IV.

It happened that one cause and another hindered Daisy from going to Crum Elbow to fetch the strawberry-baskets, until the very Tuesday afternoon before the birthday.  Then everything was right; the pony chaise before the door, Sam in waiting, and Daisy just pulling her gloves on, when Ransom rushed up.  He was flushed and hurried.

“Who’s going out with Loupe?”

“I am, Ransom.”

“You can’t go, Daisy—­I’m going myself.”

“You cannot, Ransom.  I am going on business.  Papa said I was to go.”

“He couldn’t have said it! for he said I might have the chaise this afternoon and that Loupe wanted exercise.  So!  I am going to give him some.  He wouldn’t get it with you.”

“Ransom,” said Daisy trembling, “I have got business at Crum Elbow, and I must go, and you must not.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Ransom, snapping his fingers at her.  “Business!  I guess you have.  Girls have a great deal of business!  Here Sam—­ride round mighty quick to Mr. Rush’s and tell Hamilton to meet me at the cross road.”

And without another word to Daisy, Ransom sprang into the chaise, cracked his whip over Loupe’s head and started him off in a very ungraceful but very eager waddling gallop.  Daisy was left with one glove on and with a spirit thoroughly disordered.  A passionate child she was not, in outward manner at least; but her feelings once roused were by no means easy to bring down again.  She was exceedingly offended, very much disturbed at missing her errand, very sore at Ransom’s ill-bred treatment of her.  Nobody was near; her father and mother both gone out; and Daisy sat upon the porch with all sorts of resentful thoughts and words boiling up in her mind.  She did not believe half of what her brother had said; was sure her father had given no order interfering with her proceedings; and she determined to wait upon the porch till he came home and so she would have a good opportunity of letting him know the right and the wrong of the case.  Ransom deserved it, as she truly said to herself.  And then Daisy sorrowed over her lost expedition, and her missing strawberry baskets.  What should she do? for the next morning would find work enough of its own at home, and nobody else could choose the baskets to please her.  Ransom deserved—!

In the midst of the angry thoughts that were breaking one over the other in Daisy’s mind, there suddenly came up the remembrance of some words she had read that day or the day before. “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? till seven times?  Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven.” This brought Daisy up short; her head which had been leaning on her hands suddenly straightened itself up.  What did those words mean?  There could be no doubt, for with the question came the words in the Lord’s Prayer which she