Ethel Blue listened intently.  Things like that had happened to her but she had not supposed that grown people had such experiences.  She remembered a day during the previous week when she had waked up cross.  A dozen matters went wrong before she left the house to go to school.  On the way the mud pulled off one of her overshoes, and her boot was soiled before she was shod again.  The delay made her five minutes late and caused a black mark to deface her perfect attendance record.  Every recitation went wrong in one way or another, and every one she spoke to was as cross as two sticks.  As she thought it over she realized that if what Mrs. Schuler and Moya said was true the whole trouble came from herself.  When she woke up not in the best of humor she ought to have smoothed herself out before she went down to breakfast, and then she would have picked her way calmly over the crossing and not tried to take a short cut through the mud; she would not have been delayed and earned a tardy mark; she would have had an unclouded mind that could give its best attention to the recitations so that she would have done herself justice; people would have been glad to talk to her because she looked cheerful and was in a sunny mood and no one would have been cross.

“I guess it was all my fault,” she thought.  “I guess it will pay to straighten myself out before I get out of bed every morning.”

All was well in and out of Rose House on the morning after the storm.  Every one told her experiences as if she were the only person affected and they all talked at once and enjoyed themselves immensely.  Vladimir came running up on to the porch in the middle of the morning and threw himself across his mother’s lap.

“Where have you been now?” she asked him.  He had come to breakfast only after being called a dozen times and he had disappeared immediately after breakfast.  “What have you been doing?”

The little fellow laughed and poured into her lap a handful of nickels and ten-cent pieces.

“Where in the world did you get those?” demanded Mrs. Vereshchagin.  “Who gave them to you?”

“A man in the road.”

“A man in the road?  All that money?  What for?”

“I gave him the shiny thing and he gave me those moneys.”

“What shiny thing?”

“The shiny thing I found on the floor.”

“Where on the floor?”

“In the dining-room, and the youngster ran into the house to point out exactly the place where he had found the ‘shiny thing.’”

“A ’shiny thing’,” repeated Moya, who was putting the room in order and heard the Russian woman’s inquiries. “’Tis two of ’em I found mesilf on the floor when I cleared up the mess from the fireplace this morning.  ’Twas two bits of brass.  See, I saved ’em,” and she shook from a scooped-out gourd which served as an ornament on the mantel two bits of metal.

“Was it like these, Vladdy?” she asked, but Vladimir was too tired of being questioned and ran away without answering.