She put out her hand to take the lame girl’s, but Mercy struck it smartly with her own, then whirled her chair around and returned to her former position by the window.  She handled the wheel chair with remarkable dexterity, and Ruth, following her and taking a neighboring chair said: 

“How quick you are!  You get around your room so nicely.  I think that’s fine.”

“You do; do you?” snapped the cripple.  “If you’d been tied to this chair like I have, you’d be quick, too.  I suppose it’s something for me to be grateful for; eh?”

“It must be a lot better than lying abed all the time,” said Ruth, quietly.

“Oh, yes!  I suppose so!” snapped Mercy.  Her conversation was mostly made up of snaps and snarls.  “Everybody tells me all about how happy I ought to be because I’m not worse off than I am.  That’s their tormenting ways—­ I know ’em!  There!” she added, looking out of the window.  “Here’s another of those dratted young ones!”

Ruth glanced out, too.  A lady was coming along the walk holding a little boy by the hand.  Before they reached the cottage the little boy said something to his mother and then broke away from her hand and went to the other side of her, nearest the curb.

“There! he’s hiding from me,” said Mercy, bitterly.

The lady looked up and smiled pleasantly, but the cripple only returned her pleasant salutation with a cold nod.  The child peeped out from around his mother’s skirt.

“There! go along, you nasty little thing!” muttered Mercy.  “See him trot on his little fat legs.  I wish a dog would bite ’em!” It was useless, Ruth saw, to try and bring the cripple to a better mind.  But she ignored her sallies at people who went by the window, and began to talk about the Red Mill and all that had happened to her since she had come to live with Uncle Jabez.  Gradually she drew Mercy’s attention from the street.  She told about the flood, and how she, with Helen and Tom, had raced in the big automobile down the river road to warn the people that the water was coming.  Mercy’s eyes grew big with wonder and she listened with increasing interest.

“That’s a nice place to live—­ that mill,” the cripple finally admitted, grudgingly.  “And it’s right on the river, too!”

“I can look ’way up and down the river from my window the first thing when I get up in the morning,” Ruth said.  “It’s very pretty at sunrise.  And then, the orchard and the fields are pretty.  And I like to see the men ploughing and working the land.  And the garden stuff is all coming up so pretty and green.”

“I’ve got a garden, too.  But it’s not warm enough yet to plant many flower seeds,” said Mercy.

“I suppose, when it comes warm, you can sit out in the arbor?”

“When the grape leaves get big enough to hide me—­ yes,” said Mercy.  “I don’t go into the garden excepting in schooltime.  Then the young ones aren’t always running by and tormenting me,” snapped the cripple, chopping off her speech at the end.