“She’s an ugly little thing,” said the big girls among themselves as they went edging gently and imperceptibly away towards a knot of big boys, and then Abby Atkins’s chance had come.  She advanced with a spring upon Ellen Brewster, and she pulled that blue ribbon off her head so cruelly and fiercely that she pulled out some of the golden hairs with it and threw it on the ground, and stamped on it.  Then she seized Ellen by the shoulders and proceeded to shake her for wearing a blue ribbon when she herself wore a shoe-string, but she reckoned without Ellen.  One would as soon have expected to meet fight in a little child angel as in this Ellen Brewster, but she did not come of her ancestors for nothing.

Although she was so daintily built that she looked smaller, she was in reality larger than the other girl, and as she straightened herself in her wrath she seemed a head taller and proportionately broad.  She tossed her yellow head, and her face took on an expression of noble courage and indignation, but she never said a word.  She simply took Abby Atkins by the arms and lifted her off her feet and seated her on the ground.  Then she picked up her blue ribbon, and walked off, and Abby scrambled to her feet and looked after her with a vanquished but untamed air.  Nobody had seen what happened except Abby’s younger sister Maria and Granville Joy.  Granville pressed stealthily close to Ellen as she marched away and whispered, his face blazing, his voice full of confidence and congratulation, “Say, if she’d been a boy, I’d licked her for you, and you wouldn’t hev had to tech her yourself;” and Maria walked up and eyes her prostrate but defiantly glaring sister—­“I ain’t sorry one mite, Abby Atkins,” she declared—­“so there.”

“You go ’long,” returned Abby, struggling to her feet, and shaking her small skirts energetically.

“Your dress is jest as wet as if you’d set down in a puddle, and you’ll catch it when you get home,” Maria said, pitilessly.

“I ain’t afraid.”

“What made you touch her, anyhow; she hadn’t done nothin’?”

“If you want to wear shoe-strings when other folks wear ribbons, you can,” said Abby Atkins.  She walked away, switching, with unabated dignity in the midst of defeat, the draggled tail of her poor little dress.  She had gone down like a cat; she was not in the least hurt except in her sense of justice; that was jarred to a still greater lack of equilibrium.  She felt as if she had been floored by Providence in conjunction with a blue bow, and her very soul rose in futile rebellion.  But, curiously enough, her personal ire against Ellen vanished.

At the afternoon recess she gave Ellen the sound half of an old red Baldwin apple which she had brought for luncheon, and watched her bite into it, which Ellen did readily, for she was not a child to cherish enmity, with an odd triumph.  “The other half ain’t fit to eat, it’s all wormy,” said Abby Atkins, flinging it away as she spoke.