“I think we ought to have every single thing that girls can use to make them as strong as boys,” I answered.  “When girls are strong enough not to be any burden, the boys will take them everywhere they go and everybody will have just twice as much fun.”

“I suppose you would like to make the boys learn to do tatting and sewing to let them in on that sort of kitten gatherings,” said Sam, with a laugh that was not so nice as Tony’s.

“We would, if it wasn’t for the fact that Petway does the knitting act so well that he is a perfect lady.  We never could equal him,” answered Tony, with jolly good humor to save our feelings from being hurt by Sam.

“Well, I don’t believe it will hurt—­” I was just going to say, when we heard Uncle Pompey, calling down in the barn for me to please come quick before Lovelace Peyton killed them all dead.

We all slid down, including Mamie Sue, with astonishing grace, and I promised to begin to fix the Wigwam next week.  I promised, but a pain hit my heart.  Did I know that I would be in Byrdsville next week or ever again?  What would Father do when that prosecution found him?  For ten days I had not been letting myself think about the future, but it seems that every minute I live in Byrdsville, my heart winds around my friends and theirs around mine.  To take me away now would be to tear me—­but where was Father, and why didn’t I hear what he is going to do and have done to him?

As I once more hurried down the street to the diphtheria lesson, it seemed to me that Byrdsville broke on me all suddenly as a lovely and maybe to-be-lost vision.  All the leaves have come out on the trees and vines now, and everybody’s yard is in bloom and is full of sweet odors.  Doors and windows stand wide open and people sit on their front porches and visit back and forth like every evening was a great big party.  And amid it all I have felt like I belonged to something for the first time in my life.

Then suddenly it came true that now I do belong.  This is how it happened!  Just as I had got to Lovelace Peyton and soothed him by a few lines of the symptoms of fever and nausea and headache that come first in diphtheria, Roxanne stood at the door with a telegram in her hand for me, and my heart stopped beating while it took leaps all over my body, about fifty to the second.  I promised Lovelace Peyton a half dozen rolls of antiseptic bandages and a paper of sticking-plaster and a June-bug, if I could find one, to let me into the living-hall to read it.  I felt that if it said, “No,” about the secret article I couldn’t trust myself not to let him know that something was the matter.

It didn’t say “No!” Wait, I’ll copy it, Louise!

    A payment of one thousand dollars for articles from you will
    be in Byrdsville on Saturday.  Letter follows.

    COUSIN GILMORE.