There they sat and played in the spring sunshine, warmer from day to day.  There were a great many holes and shelves and pockets and little caves in the rocks which made lovely places for playing keep-house.  Each little girl had her own particular cubby-holes and “rooms,” and they “visited” their dolls back and forth all around the pile.  And as they played they talked very fast about all sorts of things, being little girls and not boys who just yelled and howled inarticulately as they played ball or duck-on-a-rock or prisoner’s goal, racing and running and wrestling noisily all around the rocks.

There was one child who neither played with the girls nor ran and whooped with the boys.  This was little six-year-old ’Lias, one of the two boys in Molly’s first grade.  At recess time he generally hung about the school door by himself, looking moodily down and knocking the toe of his ragged, muddy shoe against a stone.  The little girls were talking about him one day as they played.  “My!  Isn’t that ’Lias Brewster the horridest-looking child!” said Eliza, who had the second grade all to herself, although Molly now read out of the second reader with her.

“Mercy, yes!  So ragged!” said Anastasia Monahan, called Stashie for short.  She was a big girl, fourteen years old, who was in the seventh grade.

“He doesn’t look as if he ever combed his hair!” said Betsy.  “It looks just like a wisp of old hay.”

“And sometimes,” little Molly proudly added her bit to the talk of the older girls, “he forgets to put on any stockings and just has his dreadful old shoes on over his dirty, bare feet.”

“I guess he hasn’t got any stockings half the time,” said big Stashie scornfully.  “I guess his stepfather drinks ’em up.”

“How can he drink up stockings!” asked Molly, opening her round eyes very wide.

“Sh!  You mustn’t ask.  Little girls shouldn’t know about such things, should they, Betsy?”

“No indeed,” said Betsy, looking mysterious.  As a matter of fact, she herself had no idea what Stashie meant, but she looked wise and said nothing.

Some of the boys had squatted down near the rocks for a game of marbles now.

“Well, anyhow,” said Molly resentfully, “I don’t care what his stepfather does to his stockings.  I wish ’Lias would wear ’em to school.  And lots of times he hasn’t anything on under those horrid old overalls either!  I can see his bare skin through the torn places.”

“I wish he didn’t have to sit so near me,” said Betsy complainingly.  “He’s so dirty.”

“Well, I don’t want him near me, either!” cried all the other little girls at once.  Ralph glanced up at them frowning, from where he knelt with his middle finger crooked behind a marble ready for a shot.  He looked as he always did, very rough and half-threatening.  “Oh, you girls make me sick!” he said.  He sent his marble straight to the mark, pocketed his opponent’s, and stood up, scowling at the little mothers.  “I guess if you had to live the way he does you’d be dirty!  Half the time he don’t get anything to eat before he comes to school, and if my mother didn’t put up some extra for him in my box he wouldn’t get any lunch either.  And then you go and jump on him!”