Patience trembled all over.  “My mother is gone away.  I don’t know as she would want me to go,” she ventured despairingly.

“He wants you to come right away,” said Susan.

“I don’t believe mother’d want me to leave the house alone.”

“I’ll stay an’ rest till you git back; I’d jest as soon.  I’m all tuckered out comin’ up the hill.”

Patience was very pale.  She cast an agonized glance at Martha.  “I spent the Squire’s sixpence for those peppermints,” she whispered.  She had not told her before.

Martha looked at her in horror—­then she begun to cry.  “Oh!  I made you do it,” she sobbed.

“Won’t you go with me?” groaned Patience.

“One little gal is enough,” spoke up Susan Elder.  “He won’t like it if two goes.”

That settled it.  Poor little Patience Mather crept meekly out of the house and down the hill to Squire Bean’s, without even Martha’s foreboding sympathy for consolation.

She looked ahead wistfully all the way.  If she could only see her mother coming—­but she did not, and there was Squire Bean’s house, square and white and massive, with great sprawling clumps of white peonies in the front yard.

She went around to the back door, and raised a feeble clatter with the knocker.  Mrs. Squire Bean, who was tall and thin and mild-looking, answered her knock.  “The—­Squire—­sent—­for—­me”—­choked Patience.

“Oh!” said the old lady, “you air the little Mather-gal, I guess.”

Patience shook so she could hardly reply.

“You’d better go right into his room,” said Mrs. Squire Bean, and Patience followed her.  She gave her a little pat when she opened a door on the right.  “Don’t you be afeard,” said she; “he won’t say nothin’ to you.  I’ll give you a piece of sweet-cake when you come out.”

Thus admonished, Patience entered.  “Here’s the little Mather-gal,” Mrs. Bean remarked; then the door closed again on her mild old face.

[Illustration:  LITTLE PATIENCE OBEYS THE SQUIRE’S SUMMONS.]

When Patience first looked at that room, she had a wild impulse to turn and run.  A conviction flashed through her mind that she could outrun Squire Bean and his wife easily.  In fact, the queer aspect of the room was not calculated to dispel her nervous terror.  Squire Bean’s peculiarities showed forth in the arrangement of his room, as well as in other ways.  His floor was painted drab, and in the center were the sun and solar system depicted in yellow.  But that six-rayed yellow sun, the size of a large dinner plate, with its group of lesser six-rayed orbs as large as saucers, did not startle Patience as much as the rug beside the Squire’s bed.  That was made of a brindle cow-skin with—­the horns on.  The little girl’s fascinated gaze rested on these bristling horns and could not tear itself away.  Across the foot of the Squire’s bed lay a great iron bar; that was a housewifely scheme of his own to keep the clothes well down at the foot.  But Patience’s fertile imagination construed it into a dire weapon of punishment.