Bitterly the self-exiled turned from this harrowing scene and strode toward his box.

Here ensued a fresh complication.  Nancy, who had chosen the good name of Lillian May, wanted to go with him.  She, too, it appeared, was fresh from a Sunday-school book—­one in which a girl of her own age was so proud of her long raven curls that she was brought to an illness and all her hair came out.  There was a distressing picture of this little girl after a just Providence had done its work as a depilatory.  And after she recovered from the fever, it seemed, she had cared to do nothing but read the Scriptures to bed-ridden old ladies—­even after a good deal of her hair came in again—­though it didn’t curl this time.  The only pleasure she ever experienced thereafter was that, by virtue of her now singularly angelic character, she was enabled to convert an elderly female Papist—­an achievement the joys of which were problematic, both to Nancy and the little boy.  Certainly, whatever converting a Papist might be, it was nothing comparable to driving a red-and-green-and-gold wagon in which was caged the Scourge of the Jungle.

But Nancy could not go with him.  He told her so plainly.  It was no place for a girl beyond that hill where they commonly drove caged beasts, and no one ever so much as thought of Coming to the Feet or washing in the blood of the Lamb, or writing a good business hand with the first finger of it pointing out, or anything.

The little girl pleaded, promising to take her new pink silk parasol, her buff buttoned shoes, a Christmas card with real snow on it, shining like diamonds, and Fragile, her best doll.  The thing was impossible.  Then she wept.

He whistled to Penny, who came barking joyously—­a pretender of a dog, if there ever was one—­and they moved off.  Weeping after them went Nancy—­as far as the first fence, between two boards of which she put her head and sobbed with a heavenly bitterness; for to the little boy, pushing sternly on, her tears afforded that certain thrill of gratified brutality under conscious rectitude, the capacity for which is among those matters by which Heaven has set the male of our species apart from the female.  The sensation would have been flawless but for Allan’s lack of dignity:  from the top board of the fence he held aloft in either hand a golden orange, and he chanted in endless inanity: 

  Chink, Chink Chiraddam! 
  Don’t you wisht you had ’em? 
    Chink, Chink Chiraddam! 
    Don’t you wisht you had ’em?

Still he was actually and triumphantly off.

And here should be recalled the saying of a certain wise, simple man:  “If our failures are made tragic by courage they are not different from successes.”  For it came about that the subsequent dignity of this revolt was to be wholly in its courage.

The way led over a stretch of grassy prairie to a fence.  This surmounted, there came a ploughed field, of considerable extent to one carrying an inconvenient box.  At the farther end of this was another fence, and beyond this an ancient orchard with a grassy floor, where lingered a few old apple-trees, under which the recumbent cows, chewing and placid, dozed like stout old ladies over their knitting.