“I don’t like it, my daughter,” said Malcolm, rubbing his shins together and polishing his glasses as he sat by the fire.  “I don’t like it at all.  I don’t like this tendency to permit familiarities with this young man and that young man—­all very well for a while, but not the sort of thing a young man chooses in a wife.”

Martie, looking at him respectfully, as she placed a red Queen on a black King, felt in her heart that she would like to kill him.

The next afternoon she decided to clean the chicken house, one of the tasks in which her strange nature delighted.  To splash about with hose and broom, tip over the littered drinking trough, wash cobwebs from the windows with a well-directed stream of water; in these things Martie found some inexplicable satisfaction.  She went upstairs after luncheon to get into old clothes, came down half an hour later with her best hat on, walked straight out of the gate and down town.

Wallace was waiting, elated at her punctuality.  Martie explaining her fear that some one might report their meeting to her father, they waited openly at Masset’s corner, boarded the half-past three o’clock trolley, and went to Pittsville.

Pittsville was two miles away, but this adventure had all the charm of foreign travel to Martie.  Every house interested her, the main street of the little town might have been Broadway in New York.  The people looked different, she said.  She and Wallace laughed their way through the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, enjoyed a Floradora Special composed of bananas, ice cream, nuts, whipped cream, maple syrup, and cherries, and finally bought six cream puffs and carried them to Sally.

Sally’s delight was almost tearful.  She led Martie rapturously over her domain:  the little bedroom spotless and sunshiny in the summer afternoon; the microscopic kitchen scented with the baked apples that had burned a little and the cookies that would not brown; the living-and-dining room that was at once so bare and so rich.  It was a home, Martie realized dimly, and Sally was a person at last.  The younger sister peeped interestedly into spice-tins and meat safe; three eggs were in a small yellow bowl, two thin slices of bacon on a plate.  In the bread box was half a loaf of bread and one cut slice.

“Sally, it must be fun!” said Martie.  “All this doll’s house for six dollars a month!”

“Oh—­fun!” Sally was rapturous beyond words.  She gave them pale, hot cookies; the cream puffs would delight Joe.

The three laughed and feasted happily; Martie with a new sense of freedom and independence that exhilarated her like wine.

“Find us a nice little place like this, sister,” said Wallace.  “Martie loves me, Sarah.  Their lips met in one long, rapturous kiss.  The end.”

The girls laughed joyously.  Martie went home at five, Wallace accompanying her.  She told her father that night that she had been in the Library.