eyes much the same, though they were darkened and brightened by streaks of green radiating from the pupils, turning them to an unusually fine hazel. Her skin was fine and smooth and white, her lips unusually red as well as beautifully curved; but her mouth was large and her nose what is termed a "pug," and apparently every one shared the girl's own opinion that she was utterly and hopelessly ugly. In reality it was to sensitiveness in regard to her personal appearance that the violence of her temper was due; it had been, indeed, contemporaneous with her entrance into the intermediate school, where she had discovered, through the teasing of little boys, that to be red-headed is to be a butt and even a pariah. Later she had learned in self-defense to ward off teasing and ridicule, first, by pretending not to mind, then, and more successfully, by turning about and joking herself about her red hair and freckles as if they were the wig and mask of a clown, never letting a chance for a jest escape her, nor allowing any one else to anticipate her. None the less, in spite of all that, Rusty had grown only the more sensitive as she had grown older. No one dreamed the ordeal it had been to her to enter the academy. She seemed daily to read the same thing in the faces of others that she saw in her mirror, and she suffered untold agony. And this morning it was the scarlet collar against her freckles that had undone her, unawares. Unawares, for she had worn red ever since she could remember and never dreamed it made any difference. A second cousin living in New York City who was just Rusty's height, though stouter, and who apparently grew at the same rate, had passed on to her for years her discarded but littleworn clothing. It was always of good stuff, well and attractively made, but the cousin was a pretty brunette and the dresses and jackets were invariably red and generally scarlet. And nothing could have been found more utterly unsuited to Rusty's complexion. "Reuben Cartwright," she shouted from the pantry, then appeared on the threshold with mantling cheeks and flashing eyes, "for goodness sake, won't you leave that wood-box alone! You never let me get anywhere near the bottom of it! I always have to take the wood off the very top of it and I'm sick and tired of it. I'd just like to fling every stick in your arms out the window, right through the glass, and I wouldn't care a bit if every blooming bird in South Hollow was just taking its bath out there in the pool and got killed-smashed flat, like they'd been through a wringer!" Startled and amazed, Reuben gazed at her over the armful of wood. "I'll take it out, Rusty," he said seriously. "I suppose that underneath is dryer." Her eyes fairly blazed. "You know that's not what I mean, Reuben Cartwright," she cried. "It's only that you make me just wild, you're so impossibly and everlastingly good! Why don't you be satisfied with filling the wood-box when it's empty, and sometimes let a person ask for a drink of water or a screw-driver or a thimble or You know if people lived with you long, they'd get just like Alexander Selkirk.” Reuben went out with the wood. When he came in again with the spring-water for breakfast, he had reached the lines in the poem Rusty referred to that explained her allusion. He thought her wonderfully clever. "Never hear the sweet music of speech, I start at the sound of my own,' he quoted with a shadow of a smile. "Well, Rusty, after all, I don't believe you need to worry yet a while." Rusty half smiled too. The flash of temper had died down, but the girl was not out of the gloom. "Honestly, Reuben, don't you get tired of being so good, so sort of placidly good, all the time?" she queried. "You know you're just like an old man. You don't seem to care about anything except doing things for other people before they even know they want 'em. Why don't you play sometimes? You're only fourteen. Why don't you hang round after school and cut up shines with the boys?" Reuben's brow clouded. "I don't seem to want to, Rusty," he confessed sadly. "Sometimes I sort of wish myself that I did. But you know what the teacher told us in physiology about tying up your arm and not using it? Well, I haven't played or anything since my mother died, and I guess I've grown too stiff now. I always had to look out for father, you see, and do for him, and I sort of got to feeling as if I was his father." "Well, you could do for people, as you call it, if you were a little livelier, Reuben," she insisted. "The boys would like you better, too. The girls like you, of course, because you're good-looking and have such nice manners." Reuben colored. Rusty disappeared into the pantry. "As for me, I'm going to have as good a time as ever I can," she observed as she came out with the egg-basket and dropped the eggs carefully into the bubbling water. "I don't want to be old and serious like you until I'm at least twenty. I'll tell you what I'd love to do-go into society and wear |