By-and-by Prince began to get very uneasy. It was long past his dinner hour, and every time he heard the screen door slam he jumped up and gazed eagerly and with cocked ears and wagging tail in that direction.

“You poor thing, you,” said Carolyn May at last. “I s’pose you are hungry. It isn’t going to do you a bit of good to eat; but you don’t know it. I’ll ask Aunty Rose if she has something for you.”

She got up wearily and went across the yard. Aunty Rose stood just inside the screen door.

“Don’t you want any dinner, Car’lyn May?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. I guess I’d better not eat,” said the child.

“Why not?”

“’Cause my stomach’s so trembly. I just know I couldn’t keep anything down, even if I could swallow it. But Prince’ll eat his, please. He—he don’t know any better.”

“Tut, tut!” murmured the woman. “He’s the most sensible of the two of you, I declare.”

But she did not urge Carolyn May to eat. There was a platter of broken meat and bread for the dog, and Prince ate with apparent thankfulness.

“But you wouldn’t gobble that down so, if you knew what was going to happen to us, you poor dear,” Carolyn May whispered.

Later she took Prince around the premises on his leash. She led him along the edge of the brook. The Stagg place bordered on both sides of the stream, and on the farther side were hayfields. Uncle Joe did not till any land save the garden in which the unhappy Prince had done such damage.

The little girl found, she believed, what must be the deepest hole in the brook. It was not far beyond the great, widely spreading tree on the knoll where she loved to sit. The water was brown and cloudy in this pool, and a trout jumped there and left a wake of bubbles behind him where he dived again with the luckless fly he had snapped out of the air.

“I wonder if that trout will stay there if you are drownd-ed right where he lives?” Carolyn May asked of Prince.

Prince wagged his abbreviated tail and yawned. Really, he seemed very little impressed by the tragic fate that overhung him. Perhaps Carolyn May’s feelings would have been less desperate had she been blessed, as Prince was just then, by a full stomach.

Nevertheless, the tragedy was all very real to the child. She saw Aunty Rose sitting in one of her stiffest and most straight-backed chairs on the porch, knitting. Carolyn May would not go near her, for she knew she would burst out crying at the first kind word.

She had learned to love Aunty Rose. The old lady always waited for Carolyn May to say her prayers now, when bedtime came. And the child had a well-grounded suspicion that before Mrs. Kennedy sought her own bed she crept into Carolyn May’s room and kissed her softly and saw that she was tucked in.

She felt that she would be sorry to leave Aunty Rose. And there was the woman whose husband kept the store on the other corner from the Stagg house. She had given Carolyn May a stick of candy one day.

“I expect she’ll be sorry not to see me again,” the little girl told herself. “And there’s Mrs. Gormley—and Chet. They’ll think it funny I didn’t bid them good-bye. And, then, there’s Mr. Parlow.”

After all, there seemed to be quite a number of people Carolyn May knew—“just to be acquainted with.” But she had never yet seen the fulfilment of her strong desire to become acquainted with the carpenter’s daughter, Miss Amanda Parlow.

All these thoughts shuttled back and forth in Carolyn May’s brain. The minutes of that afternoon dragged by in most doleful procession. There was no idea in the little girl’s mind that Uncle Joe might change his intention and Prince be saved from the watery grave promised him. When she saw the hardware dealer come into the yard almost an hour earlier than their usual supper time she was not surprised. Nor did she think of pleading with him for the dog’s life.

The little girl watched him askance. Mr. Stagg came directly through the yard, stopping only at the shed for a moment. There he secured a strong potato sack, and with it trailing from his hand went halfway up the knoll to where there was a heap of stones. He stooped down and began to select some of these, putting them in the bag.

This was too much for Carolyn May. With a fearful look at Uncle Joe’s uncompromising shoulders, she went to the tree where Prince was chained. Exchanging the chain for the leather leash with which she always led him about, the little girl guided the mongrel across the yard and around the corner of the house.

Her last backward glance assured her that the hardware dealer had not observed her. Quickly and silently she led Prince to the front gate, and they went out together into the dusty road.

“I—I know we oughtn’t to,” whispered Carolyn May to her canine friend, “but I feel I’ve just got to save you, Prince. I—I can’t see you drownd-ed dead like that!”

Prince whined in sympathy. Perhaps he felt, too, that life held much that was good and beautiful to his doggish soul.

Carolyn May had no idea where they should go to hide from Uncle Joe. This venture was the result of a sudden and unpremeditated determination. Her only thought at first was to get out of sight of the Stagg premises.

So she turned the nearest corner and went up the road towards the little closed, gable-roofed cottage where Aunty Rose had lived before she had come to be Uncle Joe’s housekeeper.

Carolyn May had already peered over into the small yard of the cottage and had seen that Mrs. Kennedy still kept the flower-beds weeded and the walks neat and the grass plot trimmed. But the window shutters were barred and the front door built up with boards.

Carolyn May went in through the front gate and sat down on the doorstep, while Prince dropped to a comfortable attitude beside her. The dog slept. The little girl ruminated.

She would not go back to Uncle Joe’s—no, indeed! She did not know just what she would do when dark should come, but Prince should not be sacrificed to her uncle’s wrath.

In the morning she would walk to the railroad station. She knew how to get there, and she knew what time the train left for the south. The conductor had been very kind to her all the way up from New York, and she was sure he would be glad to take her back again.

She and Prince! They were both happier in that small Harlem apartment, even with papa and mamma away, than they ever could be at Sunrise Cove. And, of course, Prince could not be happy after he was “drownd-ed dead!”

So it all seemed to the heart-hungry child sitting on the doorstep of the abandoned house. A voice, low, sweet, yet startling, aroused her.

“What are you doing there, little girl?”

Both runaways started, but neither of them was disturbed by the appearance of her who had accosted Carolyn May.

“Oh, Miss Mandy!” breathed the little girl, and thought that the carpenter’s daughter had never looked so pretty.

“What are you doing there?” repeated Miss Parlow.

“We—we’ve run away,” said Carolyn May at last. She could be nothing but frank; it was her nature.

“Run away!” repeated the pretty woman. “You don’t mean that?”

“Yes, ma’am. I have. And Prince. From Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose,” Carolyn May assured her, nodding her head with each declaration.

“Oh, my dear! What for?” asked Miss Amanda.

So Carolyn May told her—and with tears.

Meanwhile the woman came into the yard and sat beside the child on the step. With her arm about the little girl, Miss Amanda snuggled her up close, wiping the tears away with her own handkerchief.

“I just can’t have poor Prince drownd-ed,” Carolyn May sobbed. “I’d want to be drownd-ed myself, too.”

“I know, dear. But do you really believe your Uncle Joseph would do such a thing? Would he drown your dog?”

“I-I saw him putting the stones in the bag,” sobbed Carolyn May. “And he said he would.”

“But he said it when he was angry, dear. We often say things when we are angry—more’s the pity!—which we do not mean, and for which we are bitterly sorry afterwards. I am sure, Carolyn May, that your Uncle Joe has no intention of drowning your dog.”

“Oh, Miss Amanda! Are you pos’tive?”

“Positive! I know Joseph Stagg. He was never yet cruel to any dumb creature. Go ask him yourself, Carolyn May. Whatever else he may be, he is not a hater of helpless and dumb animals.”

“Miss Amanda,” cried Carolyn May, with clasped hands, “you—you are just lifting an awful big lump off my heart! I’ll run and ask him right away.”

She put up her lips for Miss Amanda to kiss, but she could not wait to walk properly with her new friend to the corner. Instead, she raced with the barking Prince back to the Stagg premises. Mr. Stagg had just finished filling in with the stones the trench Prince had dug under the garden fence.

“There,” he grunted. “That dratted dog won’t dig this hole any bigger, I reckon. What’s the matter with you, Car’lyn?”

“Are—are you going to drownd Princey, Uncle Joe? If—if you do, it just seems to me, I—I shall die!”

He looked up at her searchingly.

“Humph! is that mongrel so all-important to your happiness that you want to die if he does?” demanded the man.

“Yes, Uncle Joe.”

“Humph!” ejaculated the hardware dealer again. “I believe you think more of that dog than you do of me.”

“Yes, Uncle Joe.”

The frank answer hit Mr. Stagg harder than he would have cared to acknowledge.

“Why?” he queried.

“Because Prince never said a word to hurt me in his life!” said Carolyn May, sobbing.

The man was silenced. He felt in his inmost heart that he had been judged.

CHAPTER IX—PRINCE AWAKENS THE CORNERS

By this first week in September the little girl was quite settled in her new home at The Corners. Prince was still a doubtful addition to the family, both Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose plainly having misgivings about him. But in regard to the little girl herself, the hardware merchant and the housekeeper were of one opinion, even though they did not admit it to each other.

Aunty Rose remained, apparently, as austere as ever, while Joseph Stagg was quite as much immersed in business as formerly. Yet there were times, when she and the child were alone, that Mrs. Kennedy unbent, in a greater or less degree. And on the part of Joseph Stagg, he found himself thinking of sunny-haired, blue-eyed “Hannah’s Car’lyn” with increasing frequency.

“Didn’t you ever have any little girls, Aunty Rose?” Carolyn May asked the housekeeper on one of these intimate occasions. “Or little boys? I mean of your very own.”

“Yes,” said Aunty Rose in a matter-of-fact tone. “Three. But only to have them in my arms for a very little while. Each died soon after coming to me. There was something quite wrong with them all, so the doctors said.”

“Oh, my dear! All three of them?” sighed Carolyn May.

“Two girls and a boy. Only one lived to be three months old. They are all buried behind the church yonder. My husband, Frank Kennedy, was not one of us. I married out of Meeting.”

The little girl knew that she meant her husband, long since dead, had not been a member of the congregation of Friends. She leaned against Mrs. Kennedy’s chair and tucked what was meant to be a comforting hand into that of Aunty Rose.

“Now I know something about you,” Carolyn May said softly.

“What is that?” asked the woman, her eyes smiling at the child if her lips did not.

“I know why it is you don’t know just how to cuddle little girls and show ’em how much you love ’em. All little children, I mean—not only me.”

Aunty Rose looked down at her with unchanging countenance, but Carolyn May looked fearlessly up into the woman’s face. No amount of grimness there could trouble the child now. For she knew something else about Aunty Rose. The housekeeper loved her!

“Yes, you didn’t have your little babies long enough to learn how to cuddle and snug ’em up. That’s it. You ought to learn, Aunty Rose.”

“What for?” asked Aunty Rose Kennedy rather sharply.

“Why! so you could take me up into your lap and hug and kiss me—just as my mamma used to do.”

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I guess, Car’lyn May,” said Aunty Rose. “Seems to me too much hugging spoils children.”

“Oh, no, indeed!” cried the little girl confidently. “Never! My papa used to snug me up lots. Do you know what he used to call me?”

“No.”

“It was just for fun, you know. Just a pet name. Snuggy. He ’most always called me that. ’Cause I liked to be snuggled up.”

Aunty Rose made no rejoinder.

The next morning early Carolyn May, with Prince, went over into the churchyard and found the three little stones in a row. She knew they must be the right ones, for there was a bigger stone, with the inscription, “Frank Kennedy, beloved spouse of Rose Kennedy,” upon it. “Spouse” puzzled the little girl at first, but she felt timid about asking Aunty Rose about it.

The names on the three little stones were Emeline, Frank, Jr., and Clarissa. Weeds and tall grass had begun to sprout about the tombstones in the old churchyard.

Carolyn May pulled the unsightly weeds from about the little, lozenge-shaped stones and about the taller one, and she dug out a mullen plant that grew on one of the graves.

While she was thus engaged, a tall man in black—looking rather “weedy” himself, if the truth were told—came across the graveyard and stood beside her. He wore a broad band of crêpe around his hat and on his arm, and was very grave and serious-looking.

“Who are you, little girl?” he asked, his voice being quite agreeable and his tone kindly.

“I’m Car’lyn May, if you please,” she replied, looking up at him frankly.

“Car’lyn May Stagg?” he asked. “You’re Mr. Stagg’s little girl? I’ve heard of you.”

“Car’lyn May Cameron,” she corrected seriously. “I’m only staying with Uncle Joe. He is my guardian, and he had to take me, of course, when my papa and mamma were lost at sea.”

“Indeed?” returned the gentleman. “Do you know who I am?”

“I—I think,” said Carolyn May doubtfully, “that you must be the undertaker.”

For a moment the gentleman looked startled. Then he flushed a little, but his eyes twinkled.

“The undertaker?” he murmured. “Do I look like that?”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Carolyn May. “I don’t really know you, you know. Maybe you’re not the undertaker.”

“No, I am not. Though our undertaker, Mr. Snivvins, is a very good man.”

“Yes, sir,” said the little girl politely.

“I am the pastor here—your pastor, I hope,” he said, putting a kind hand upon her head.

“Oh, I know you now!” said Carolyn May brightly. “You’re the man Uncle Joe says is going to get a strangle hold on Satan, now that vacation is over.”

The Reverend Afton Driggs looked rather odd again. The shocking frankness of the child came pretty near to flooring him.

“I—ahem! Your uncle compliments me,” he said drily. “You don’t know that he is ready to do his share, do you?”

“His share?” repeated the puzzled little girl.

“Towards strangling the Evil One,” pursued the minister, a wry smile curling the corners of his lips.

“Has he got a share in it, too?” asked Carolyn May.

“I think we all should have,” said the minister, looking down at her with returning kindliness in his glance. “Even little girls like you.”

Carolyn May looked at him quite seriously.

“Do you s’pose,” she asked him confidentially, “that Satan is really wicked enough to trouble little girls?”

It was a startling bit of new philosophy thus suggested, and Mr. Driggs shook his head in grave doubt. But it gave him something to think of all that day; and the first sermon preached in The Corners church that autumn seemed rather different from most of those solid, indigestible discourses that the good man was wont to drone out to his parishioners.

“Dunno but it is worth while to give the parson a vacation,” pronounced Uncle Joe at the dinner table. “Seems to me, his sermon this morning seemed to have a new snap to it. Mebbe he’ll give old Satan a hard rub this winter, after all.”

“Joseph Stagg!” said Aunty Rose admonishingly.

“I think he’s a very nice man,” said Carolyn May suddenly. “And I kep’ awake most of the time—you see, I heard poor Princey howling for me here, where he was tied up.”

“Hum!” ejaculated Mr. Stagg. “Which kept you awake—the dog or the minister?”

“Oh, I like Mr. Driggs very much,” the little girl assured him. “And he’s in great ’fliction, too, I am sure. He—he wears crêpe on his hat and sleeve.”

“Hum, so he does,” grunted Mr. Stagg. “He’s ’most always in mourning for somebody or something. I tell him his name ought to be Jeremiah instead of ‘Sweet Afton,’” which comment was, of course, lost on Carolyn May. But she said seriously:

“Do you s’pose, Uncle Joe, that he looks up enough? It does just seem to me as though poor Mr. Driggs must always be looking down instead of looking up to see the sunshine and the blue sky and—and the mountains, like my papa said you should.”

Uncle Joe was silent. Aunty Rose said, very briskly for her:

“And your papa was right, Car’lyn May. He was a very sensible man, I have no doubt.”

“Oh, he was quite a wonderful man,” said the little girl with full assurance.

It was on the following morning that school opened. The Corners district school was a red building, with a squatty bell tower and two front doors, standing not far up the road beyond the church. Carolyn May thought it a very odd-looking schoolhouse indeed.

The school she had attended in New York was a big brick-and-stone building, with wide corridors, well-ventilated rooms, a lovely basement gymnasium, a great hall, a roof garden in summer, part of which was enclosed with glass and steam-heated in winter.

Inside the little red schoolhouse were only rows of desks and “forms”—all marred, knife-marked, and ink-stained. The initials of the very “oldest inhabitant” of The Corners, Mr. Jackson Sprague, were carved in the lid of one desk. And the system of education followed in this school seemed to be now much what it had been in Mr. Sprague’s day.

Miss Minnie Lester taught the school, and although Miss Minnie looked very sharply through her glasses at one, Carolyn May thought she was going to love the teacher very much.

Indeed, that was Carolyn May’s attitude towards almost everybody whom she met. She expected to love and to be loved. Was it any wonder she made so many friends?

But this country school was conducted so differently from the city school that Carolyn May found herself quite puzzled on many points.

She had to divide her desk with another little girl, Freda Payne. Freda was a black-eyed, snappy little girl who could whisper out of the corner of her mouth without the teacher’s seeing her do it. She instructed Carolyn May from time to time regarding this new world the city child had entered into.

“Goodness me! didn’t you ever have a slate before?” she whispered to Carolyn May.

“No,” the little city girl confessed. “They don’t let us use them where I went to school. They make too much noise. And, then, they aren’t clean.”

“Clean! Course they’re clean, if you keep ’em clean,” declared Freda fiercely.

She showed the stranger the bottle of water she kept in her desk and the sponge with which she washed her slate.

“But the sponge is dirty. And it smells!” ventured Carolyn May, with a slight shudder. She had heard of germs, and the mussy-looking bit of sponge was not an attractive object.

“’Tain’t neither!” snapped Freda, making her denial positive with two negatives. “The boys spit on their slates and wipe ’em off on their jacket sleeves. That’s nasty. But us girls is clean.”

Carolyn May could not see it, however, and she ignored her own slate.

“You can’t use that pencil to write with on paper,” Freda caught her up with another admonition.

“That’s a slate pencil, if it has got wood around it.”

“Oh, dear me! Is it?” sighed the new pupil. “And I haven’t any other here, that I can see.”

“Well, I’ll lend you one. But don’t chew the lead. I hate to have folks chew my lead pencils.”

Carolyn May promised not to lunch off of the borrowed writing instrument.

But these were not all the pitfalls into which the new pupil fell. The morning session was not half over before she wished for a drink of water. Of course, she asked her seatmate about it.

“You must raise your hand till Miss Minnie sees you. You’ll have to waggle your hand good to make her look, like enough,” added Carolyn May’s mentor. “Then, if she nods, you go back to the entry and get your drink.”

“Oh,” was the comment of the city child, and she immediately raised her hand. She did not have to “waggle” it much before Miss Minnie took notice of her.

“Well, Carolyn May?” she said.

“May—may I get a drink—please?” almost whispered Carolyn May, for she felt very much embarrassed.

Miss Minnie nodded. The little girl rose and went back to the entry on the girls’ side of the house. She looked all about this rather large square room without finding what she sought.

Against two walls were rows of pegs, on which were hung the coats and hats and dinner baskets, or dinner pails, of the pupils. In the corner was a shelf with a dingy bucket upon it and a rusty tin dipper hanging beside it.

Finally, Carolyn May came slowly back to her seat. Miss Minnie was busy with a class of older pupils. Freda asked—of course out of the corner of her mobile mouth:

“Did you get your drink?”

Carolyn May shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I didn’t see any faucet.”

“Faucet! What’s that for?” demanded the other little girl.

“Why, to get the water out of. Isn’t there a cold-water tank? And don’t you have paper cups?” demanded Carolyn May. “I didn’t see a thing like what we use in our school in New York.”

“Mercy me, Carolyn May!” fairly hissed Freda. “What are you talking about? We don’t have water laid on in the schoolhouse like they do at home. The pump’s in the yard. And whoever heard of paper cups? Why, paper won’t hold water!”

“Yes, they do,” the other little girl said eagerly. “They are all folded, and you take one and open it, and it holds water.”

“I think you’re fibbing!” declared her seatmate flatly.

“Oh!” gasped the new pupil, deeply hurt by the imputation.

“Yes, I do!” said Freda. “I’ve got a folding nickel cup. But who ever heard of paper cups? Everybody drinks out of the dipper.”

“That rusty old saucepan?” murmured Carolyn May in wonder.

“Huh, you’re awful finicky!” scoffed the other.

“Is the water in that pail on the shelf?”

“Yes. And don’t you spill none, or Miss Minnie will get mad at you.”

“I guess I’ll wait till I get home at noon recess,” said the little city girl. “I’m—I’m not so thirsty now.”

There proved, too, at the start, to be a little difficulty with Miss Minnie. Prince would not remain at home. He howled and whined for the first half of Monday morning’s session—as Aunty Rose confessed, almost driving her mad. Then he slipped his collar and tore away on Carolyn May’s cold trail.

He heard the children’s voices as they came out of the school at recess, and charged into the group in search of his little mistress. Carolyn May was just getting acquainted with the other pupils of her own age and was enjoying herself very much.

“Carolyn May,” pronounced Miss Minnie from the girls’ door-stoop, “you must take that horrid dog home at once! Hurry, or you will be late for the next class.”

Carolyn May was hurt by the teacher’s tone and words, and she knew Prince felt bad about it. He fairly slunk out of the schoolyard by her side, and some of the pupils laughed.

She pulled his collar up a hole tighter and begged Prince to be good and remain at home till noon. Yet, ten minutes after the session had again opened there sounded a rattling on the porch floor, and into the school marched the dog, having drawn the staple with which his chain had been fastened to the bole of the tree in Mr. Stagg’s back yard.

Miss Minnie was both alarmed and angry. Some of the little girls shrieked and wept when Prince pranced over to Carolyn May’s seat.

“If you do not shut that awful dog up so that he cannot follow you here, Carolyn May, I shall speak to your uncle, Mr. Stagg, about it. Ugh, the ugly beast! Take him away at once!”

This was entirely too much for the little girl’s good temper. Her best friend, she felt, was maligned.

“Miss Minnie,” she said breathlessly, “I don’t see how you can say Prince is ugly. I think he is beautiful! And he is just as kind as he can be!”

She was so hurt and excited because her canine friend was so disliked that she did not even cry one tear! The teacher, remaining well out of reach of the dog, repeated her command.

“Take that dog straight home, and don’t let him get in this schoolhouse again! I will not allow the other children to be so frightened.”

So Carolyn May’s schooldays at The Corners did not begin very happily, after all. She had always loved and been loved by every teacher she had ever had before. But Miss Minnie seemed prejudiced against her because of Prince.

The little girl felt bad about this, but she was of too cheerful a temperament to droop for long under the pressure of any trouble. The other children liked her, and Carolyn May found plenty of playmates. She would never loiter with them, however, in the schoolyard at noon or after school. Instead, she would hurry home and release poor Prince from duress.

It had been found impossible to keep the dog on a chain. He had almost choked himself once, and again had torn his ears getting his collar off. So the strong chicken coop under the big tree in the back yard which had first been his prison was again his cell while his little mistress was at school.

“Of course,” Carolyn May said to Aunty Rose, “we mustn’t let poor Princey know it’s because of Miss Minnie that he has to be shut up. He might take a dislike to her, just as she has to him; and that would be dreadful! If she’d only let him, I know he’d lie down right outside the schoolroom door while I was inside, and be just as good!”

But Miss Minnie remained obdurate. She did not like any dogs, and in her eyes Prince was especially objectionable.

One of the bigger girls made up a rhyme about Carolyn May and Prince, which began:

    “Car’lyn  May  had  a  mongrel  dog,
        Its  coat  was  not  white  like  snow;
    And  everywhere  that  Car’lyn  went
        That  dog  was  sure  to  go.
 
    “It  followed  her  to  school  one  day,
        Which  made  Miss  Minnie  sore;
    But  when  Car’lyn  tied  the  mongrel  up,
        It  was  bound  to  bark  and  roar.”

There were many more verses; the big girl was always adding new ones.

“I don’t mind it—much,” Carolyn May confessed to Aunty Rose, “but I wouldn’t like Prince to hear that poetry. His feelings might be hurt.”

It was on the last Friday in the month that something happened which quite changed Miss Minnie’s attitude towards “that mongrel.” Incidentally, The Corners, as a community, was fully awakened from its lethargy, and, as it chanced, like the Sleeping Beauty and all her retinue, by a Prince.

The school session on Friday afternoons was always shortened. This day Mr. Brady, one of the school trustees, came to review the school and, before he left, to pay Miss Minnie her salary for the month.

Carolyn May had permission from Aunty Rose to go calling that afternoon. Freda Payne, whom she liked very much, lived up the road beyond the schoolhouse, and she had invited the little city girl to come to see her. Of course, Prince had to be included in the invitation. Freda fully understood that, and Carolyn May took him on his leash.

They saw Miss Minnie at her desk when they went past the schoolhouse. She was correcting written exercises. Carolyn May secretly hoped that her own was much better than she feared it was.

Not far beyond the schoolhouse Prince began to growl, and the hairs stiffened on his neck.

“Whatever is the matter with you, Prince?” demanded Carolyn May.

In a moment she saw the cause of the dog’s continued agitation. A roughly dressed, bewhiskered man sat beside the road eating a lunch out of a newspaper. He leered at Carolyn May and said:

“I guess you got a bad dog there, ain’t ye, little girl?”

“Oh, no! He’s us’ally very polite,” answered Carolyn May. “You must be still, Prince! You see,” she explained, “he doesn’t like folks to wear old clothes. If—if you had on your Sunday suit, I’m quite sure he would not growl at you.”

“He wouldn’t, hey?” said the man hoarsely, licking his fingers of the last crumbs of his lunch. “An’ suppose a feller ain’t got no Sunday suit?”

“Why, then, I s’pose Prince wouldn’t ever let you come into our yard—if he was loose.”

“Don’t you let him loose now, little girl,” said the fellow, getting up hurriedly, and eyeing the angry dog askance.

“Oh, no, sir. We’re going visiting up the road. Come away, Prince. I won’t let him touch you,” she assured the man.

The latter seemed rather doubtful of her ability to hold the dog long, and he hobbled away towards the schoolhouse. Prince really objected to leaving the vicinity, and Carolyn May scolded him all the way up the road to Freda’s house.

Carolyn May had a very pleasant call—Freda’s mother even approved of Prince—and it was an hour before the two started for home. In sight of the schoolhouse Prince gave evidence again of excitement.

“I wonder what is the matter with you now,” Carolyn May began, when suddenly she sighted what had evidently so disturbed the dog.

A man was crouching under one of the schoolhouse windows, bobbing up now and then to peer in. It was the man whom they had previously seen beside the road.

“Hush, Prince!” whispered little Carolyn May, holding the dog by the collar.

She, too, could see through the open window. Miss Minnie was still at her desk. She had finished correcting the pupils’ papers. Now she had her bag open and was counting the money Mr. Brady had given her.

“O-o-oh!” breathed Carolyn May, clinging to the eager dog’s collar.

The man at the window suddenly left his position and slipped around to the door. In a moment he appeared in the schoolroom before the startled teacher.

Miss Minnie screamed. The man, with a rough threat, darted forward to seize her purse.

Just then Carolyn May unsnapped the leash from Prince’s collar and let him go.

“Save Miss Minnie, Princey!” she cried after the charging dog.

Prince did not trouble about the door. The open window, through which the tramp had spied upon the schoolmistress, was nearer. He went up the wall and scrambled over the sill with a savage determination that left no doubt whatever in the tramp’s mind.

With a yell of terror, the fellow bounded out of the door and tore along the road and through The Corners at a speed never before equalled in that locality by a Knight of the Road.

Prince lost a little time in recovering his footing and again getting on the trail of the fleeing tramp. But he was soon baying the fellow past the blacksmith shop and the store.

The incident called the entire population of The Corners, save the bedridden, to the windows and doors. For once the little, somnolent village awoke, and, as before pointed out, a Prince awoke it.

Hiram Lardner, the blacksmith, declared afterwards that “you could have played checkers on that tramp’s coat tails, providin’ you could have kep’ up with him.”

When Prince came back from the chase, however, the tramp’s coat tails would never serve as a checkerboard, for the dog bore one of them in his foam-flecked jaws as a souvenir.

CHAPTER X—A SUNDAY WALK

“We have too many of that gentry here because of the railroad. I wish he’d chase ’em all out of town,” declared the hardware dealer.

Besides, he profited by the incident. The very next day Miss Minnie came into his store and bought one of the very nicest dog collars he had in stock—a green leather one with brass rivet heads studding it and a shiny nameplate.

The silversmith, Mr. Murchiston, took almost a week to engrave on it:

The next Friday noon Miss Minnie told Carolyn May she could bring Prince to school with her—of course, on his leash. By this time all the other pupils had learned that, even if he did look savage, Prince was quite as gentle and friendly as little Carolyn May herself, and they had ceased to be afraid of him.

The afternoon session closed at the usual recess time, and then it was that Miss Minnie presented the new collar to Prince, with, as Mr. Brady, the trustee, would have said, “a few appropriate words.”

The big girl invented another verse in imitation of “Mary’s Little Lamb,” and recited it:

    “‘What  makes  Prince  love  Car’lyn  so?’
        The  little  children  cry.
    ‘Why,  Car’lyn  loves  the  dog,  you  know,’
        The  teacher  doth  reply.”

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Carolyn May happily. “It’s just like a party—a birthday party. We never celebrated Prince’s birthday before, or gave him any kind of party. But I know he enjoys it.”

He certainly did seem to appreciate the honour, and bore himself proudly with the new green collar around his neck. Uncle Joe attached his S.P.C.A. license tag to it, which jingled like a bangle.

Carolyn May was glad to see Uncle Joe do this. Everything that Uncle Joe did which showed he thought of something besides his business pleased his little niece.

“You see,” she told Aunty Rose, “I know Uncle Joe doesn’t look up enough. Whenever I’m in his store I almost always see him at his desk working at that great big book in which he keeps his accounts.

“Chet Gormley says he always is at it—Sundays, too. You know, Aunty Rose, he walks down to the store every Sunday after dinner and stays till supper time.”

“I know it, child,” the housekeeper agreed. “Joseph Stagg is completely wrapped up in his business.”

“Yes. My papa had to work hard, and awful long hours, too. But when he was away from the newspaper office he said he always left business behind him. He looked up at the sky and listened to the birds sing. Leastways,” said Carolyn May honestly, “he listened to the sparrows quarrel. There weren’t many other birds on our block, ’cept a parrot; and he scolded awfully.”

At any rate, she was quite sure that Uncle Joe ought to be interested in something besides his hardware store. She thought about this a good deal. And, finally, she laid an innocent little trap for him.

Of one tenet of the Friends’ belief Aunty Rose was thoroughly convinced: no cooking went on in the Stagg kitchen after breakfast on the Sabbath. Of course, they had dinner, but save for hot tea or coffee or soup the viands at that meal and at supper were cold.

Sometimes during the warm weather there were heaps of Aunty Rose’s flaky-crusted apple turnovers, baked the day before, to crumble into bowls of creamy milk, or there were piles of lovely sandwiches and eggs with mayonnaise, and suchlike delicacies.

Aunty Rose, however, removed her work apron when the breakfast dishes were washed and put away and the kitchen “ridded up,” and for the remainder of Sunday she did only the very necessary things about the house.

If she did not walk to town to attend the Friends’ Meeting House, she sat in a straight-backed chair and read books that—to Carolyn May—looked “awfully religious.” However, she did not make the day of rest a nightmare to the child. The little girl had her picture books, as well as her Sunday-school papers, and she could stroll about or play quietly with Prince.

The Corners was not burdened with the arrival of Sunday papers from the city, with their blotchy-looking supplements and unsightly so-called “funny sheets.” Almost everybody went to church, and all the children to Sunday-school, which was held first.

The Reverend Afton Driggs, though serious-minded, was a loving man. He was fond of children, and he and his childless wife gave much of their attention to the Sunday-school. Mrs. Driggs taught Carolyn May’s class of little girls. Mrs. Driggs did her very best, too, to get the children to stay to the preaching service, but Carolyn May had to confess that the pastor’s discourses were usually hard to understand.

“And he is always reading about the ‘Begats,’” she complained gently to Uncle Joe as they went home together on this particular Sunday—the one following the presentation of Prince’s new collar—“and I can’t keep interested when he does that. I s’pose the ‘Begats’ were very nice people, but I’m sure they weren’t related to us—they’ve all got such funny names.”

“Hum!” ejaculated Uncle Joe, smothering a desire to laugh. “Flow gently, sweet Afton, does select his passages of Scripture mostly from the ‘valleys of dry bones,’ I allow. You’ve got it about right there, Carolyn May.”

“Uncle Joe,” said the little girl, taking her courage in both hands, “will you do something for me?” Then, as he stared down at her from under his bushy brows, she added: “I don’t mean that you aren’t always doing something for me—letting me sleep here at your house, and eat with you, and all that. But something special.”

“What is the ‘something special’?” asked Mr. Stagg cautiously.

“Something I want you to do to-day. You always go off to your store after dinner, and when you come home it’s too dark.”

“Too dark for what?”

“For us to take a walk,” said the little girl very earnestly. “Oh, Uncle Joe, you don’t know how dreadful I miss taking Sunday walks with my papa! Of course, we took ’em in the morning, for he had to go to work on the paper in the afternoon, but we did just about go everywhere.

“Sometimes,” pursued Carolyn May in reminiscence, “we went to a very, very early morning service in a church. It was held pertic’lar for folks that worked at night. It wasn’t like our church where I went to Sunday-school, for there were boys in long dresses, and they swung little dishes on chains, with something burning in ’em that smelled nice, and the minister did all the talking——”

“Humph!” snorted Mr. Stagg, who was just as startled as was the Reverend Mr. Driggs by any new idea.

“And then we walked,” sighed Carolyn May. “Of course, we had often to take a ride first before we could get a place to walk in—not on pavement. On real dirt and grass! Under the trees! Where the birds sang! And the flowers lived! Oh, Uncle Joe! do you know how pretty the woods are now? The trees and bushes are all such lovely colours. I don’t dare go very far alone—not even with Prince. I might get lost, Aunty Rose says.

“But if you would go with me,” the little girl added wistfully, “just this afternoon, seems to me I wouldn’t feel so—so empty.”

That “empty” feeling from which the little girl suffered when she thought of her parents and her old life she did not often speak of. Mr. Stagg looked down at her earnest face and saw that the blue eyes were misty. But Carolyn May was brave.

“Humph!” said Uncle Joe, clearing his throat. “If it’s going to do you any particular good, Car’lyn May, I suppose I can take a walk with you. I expect the chestnuts are ripe.”

“Oh, they are, Uncle Joe! And I’ve wanted to get just a few. But whenever Princey and I go to any of the trees near by, there are always squirrels—and they do quarrel so! I s’pose that’s all they’ll have to eat this winter, and maybe the winter is going to be a hard one. That’s what Tim, the hackman, says. I don’t want to rob the poor little squirrels. But couldn’t we give ’em something instead to eat, and so take a few of their nuts?”

“The squirrels always were piggish,” chuckled Uncle Joe. “I don’t believe they are entitled to more’n a bushel apiece. Anyway, we’ll take a basket with us.”

This they did. Although Aunty Rose was very strict with herself on Sunday, she did not disapprove of this walk. And certainly Prince did not.

Once off his chain and realising that they were bound for the woods, he acted like a mad dog for the first few minutes. As they crossed the already browning fields he dashed back and forth, now far ahead, now charging back at them as though determined to run them down. Then he rolled on the grass, crept on his stomach, tearing up the sod with his strong claws, and barking with delight.

“That fool pup hasn’t got the sense he was born with,” declared Uncle Joe, but without rancour.

“He’s just happy,” explained Carolyn May. “You see, he’s happy for himself and happy for us, too. So he just has to show off this way. It isn’t really that he hasn’t good sense, Uncle Joe.”

It was a crisp day—one of those autumn days when the tang of frost remains in the air, in spite of all the efforts of the sun to warm it. The sumac had blushed redly all along the hedgerows. The young oak leaves were brown and curled. Under foot, the dead leaves rustled and whispered. The bare-limbed beeches looked naked, indeed, among the other trees. Even the yellowing leaves of the chestnuts themselves were rattling down without a breath of wind stirring.

The jays screamed at the party as they wheeled swiftly through the wood. Once Prince jumped a rabbit from its form, and Uncle Joe actually urged the excited dog in his useless chase of the frightened creature. But Carolyn May could not approve of that.

“You see,” she said gravely, “although it’s lots of fun for Prince, we don’t know just how the rabbit feels about it. Maybe he doesn’t want to run so hard. There! Prince has given it up. I’m glad.”

She did not mind the dog’s chasing and barking at the squirrels. They were well out of reach. One excited squirrel leaped from a tree top into the thick branches of another tree, sailing through the air “just like an aeroplane.” Carolyn May had seen aeroplanes and thought she would like to go up in one.

“Of course,” she explained, “not without somebody who knew all about coming down again. I wouldn’t want to get stuck up there.”

Here and there they stopped to pick up the glossy brown chestnuts that had burst from their burrs. That is, Carolyn May and her uncle did. Prince, after a single attempt to nose one of the prickly burrs, left them strictly alone.

“You might just as well try to eat Aunty Rose’s strawberry needle cushion, Princey,” the little girl said wisely. “You’ll have a sorer nose than Amos Bartlett had when he tried to file it down with a wood rasp.”

“Hum!” ejaculated Mr. Stagg, “whatever possessed that Bartlett child to do such a fool trick?”

“Why, you know his nose is awfully big,” said Carolyn May. “And his mother’s always worried about it. She must have worried Amos, too, for one day last week he went over to Mr. Parlow’s shop, borrowed a wood rasp, and tried to file his nose down to a proper size. And now he has to go with his nose all greased and shiny till the new skin grows back on it.”

“Bless me, what these kids will do!” muttered Mr. Stagg.

“Now, I’ve got big feet,” sighed Carolyn May. “I know I have. But I hope I’ll grow up to them. I wouldn’t want to try to pare them off to make them smaller. If they have got such a long start ahead of the rest of me, I really believe that the rest of me will catch up to my feet in time, don’t you?”

“Nothing like being hopeful,” commented Mr. Stagg drily.

It was just at that moment that the little girl and the man, becoming really good comrades on this walk, met with an adventure. At least, to Carolyn May it was a real adventure, and one she was not to forget for a long, long time.

Prince suddenly bounded away, barking, down a pleasant glade, through the bottom of which flowed a brook. Carolyn May caught a glimpse of something brown moving down there, and she called shrilly to the dog to come back.

“But that’s somebody, Uncle Joe” Carolyn May said with assurance, as the dog slowly returned. “Prince never barks like that, unless it’s a person. And I saw something move.”

“Somebody taking a walk, like us. Couldn’t be a deer,” said Mr. Stagg.

“Oh,” cried Carolyn May a moment later, “I see it again. That’s a skirt I see. Why, it’s a lady!”

Mr. Stagg suddenly grew very stern-looking, as well as silent. All the beauty of the day and of the glade they had entered seemed lost on him. He went on stubbornly, yet as though loath to proceed.

“Why,” murmured Carolyn May, “it’s Miss Amanda Parlow! That’s just who it is!”

The carpenter’s daughter was sitting on a bare brown log by the brook. She was dressed very prettily, all in brown. Carolyn May had seen her that day in church in this same pretty dress.

For some weeks Miss Amanda had been away “on a case.” Carolyn May knew that she was a trained nurse and was often away from home weeks at a time. Mr. Parlow had told her about it.

The little girl wanted to speak to the pretty Miss Amanda, but she looked again into Uncle Joe’s countenance and did not dare.

CHAPTER XI—A CANINE INTERVENTION

She wanted to seize Uncle Joe’s hand and whisper to him how pretty Miss Amanda looked. She wanted to run to the lady and talk to her. Thus far she had found little opportunity for knowing Miss Amanda Parlow well, although Carolyn May and the old carpenter were now very good friends.

Hanging to Uncle Joe’s hand, but looking longingly at the silent figure on the log, Carolyn May was going down to the stepping-stones by which they were to cross the brook, when, suddenly, Prince came to a halt right at the upper end of the log and his body stiffened.

“What is it, Prince?” whispered his little mistress. “Come here.”

But the dog did not move. He even growled—not at Miss Amanda, of course, but at something on the log. And it was just then that Carolyn May wanted to scream—and she could not!

For there on the log, raising its flat, wicked head out of an aperture, its lidless eyes glittering, and its forked tongue shooting in and out of its jaws, was a snake, a horrid, silent, writhing creature, the look of which held the little girl horror-stricken and speechless.

Uncle Joe glanced down impatiently, to see what made her hold back so. The child’s feet seemed glued to the earth. She could not take another step.

Writhing out of the hole in the log and coiling, as it did so, into an attitude to strike, the snake looked to be dangerous, indeed. The fact that it was only a large blacksnake and non-poisonous made no difference at that moment to the dog or to the little girl—nor to Joseph Stagg when he saw it.

It was coiled right at Miss Amanda’s back. She did not see it, for she was quite as intent upon keeping her face turned from Mr. Stagg as he had been determined to ignore her presence.

After all, it is the appearance of a snake that terrifies some people. They do not stop to question whether it is furnished with a poison sac or not. The very look of the creature freezes their blood.

Carolyn May was shaking and helpless. Not so Prince. He repeated his challenging growl and then sprang at the vibrating head. Miss Amanda uttered a stifled scream and jumped up from the log, whirling to see what was happening behind her.

Joseph Stagg dropped Carolyn May’s hand and leaped forward with his walking-stick raised to strike. But the mongrel dog was there first. He wisely caught the blacksnake behind the head, his strong, sharp teeth severing its vertebræ.

“Good dog!” shouted Mr. Stagg excitedly. “Fine dog!”

“Oh, Miss Amanda!” shrieked Carolyn May. “I—I thought he was going to sting you—I did!”

She ran to the startled woman and clung to her hand. Prince nosed the dead snake. Mr. Stagg looked exceedingly foolish. Miss Amanda recovered her colour and her voice simultaneously.

“What a brave dog yours is, little girl,” she said to Carolyn May. “And I do so despise snakes!” Then she looked directly at Mr. Stagg and bowed gravely. “I thank you,” she said, but so coldly, so Carolyn May thought, that her voice might have come “just off an iceberg.”

“Oh, I didn’t do anything—really I didn’t,” stammered the man. “It was the dog.”

“Oh!” said Miss Amanda.

“Yes,” repeated Mr. Stagg, “it was the dog.”

Both looked very uncomfortable. Joseph Stagg began to pick up the scattered chestnuts from the overturned basket. The lady stooped and whispered to Carolyn May:

“Come to see me, my dear. I want to know you better.”

“And Prince?” asked the little girl.

“And Prince, of course.”

Then she kissed Carolyn May and slipped quietly away from the brook, disappearing very quickly in the undergrowth. Uncle Joe stood up, with the basket in his hand.

“You’d better call the dog away from that snake, Car’lyn May,” he said in a strangely husky voice. “We’ll be going.”

The little girl approved.

“You surely don’t want to eat it, Prince,” she told her canine friend. “Snakes aren’t meat, nor even fish. Are they, Uncle Joe?”

“Humph! what d’you s’pose they are, then?” he demanded.

“Why, they’re—they’re just insects, aren’t they? Not even dogs should eat them,” and she urged Prince away from the snake.

The muscles of the “insect” still twitched, and its tail snapped about. Prince had his doubts as to whether it was really dead or was “playing possum.”

“Is it true, Uncle Joe,” Carolyn May asked, “that snakes can’t really die till the sun goes down? You see, it still wiggles. Do—do you s’pose it’s suffering?”

“I guess Prince fixed Mr. Snake, all right, at the first bite,” returned Mr. Stagg. “He’s dead. That old idea about the critters holding the spark of life till after sunset is just a superstition. We can safely call that fellow dead and leave him.”

Joseph Stagg and the little girl went on across the stepping-stones, while Prince splashed through the water. Carolyn May was thinking about Miss Amanda Parlow, and she believed her Uncle Joe was, too.

“Uncle Joe,” she said, “would that bad old snake have stung Miss Amanda?”

“Huh? No; I reckon not,” admitted Mr. Stagg absent-mindedly. “Blacksnakes don’t bite. A big one like that can squeeze some.”

“But you were scared of it—like me and Prince. And for Miss Amanda,” said Carolyn May, very much in earnest.

“I guess ’most everybody is scared by the sight of a snake, Car’lyn May.”

“But you were scared for Miss Amanda’s sake—just the same as I was,” repeated the little girl decidedly.

“Well?” he growled, looking away, troubled by her insistence.

“Then you don’t hate her, do you?” the child pursued. “I’m glad of that, Uncle Joe, for I like her very much. I think she’s a beautiful lady.”

To this Uncle Joe said nothing. He was not to be drawn, badger-like, to the mouth of his den. What he really thought of Miss Amanda he kept to himself.

“Anyway,” sighed Carolyn May at last, “she invited me to come to see her, now she’s home from nursing. And, if you haven’t got any objection, Uncle Joe, I’m going to see her.”

“Go ahead,” said Mr. Stagg. “I haven’t anything to say against it.”

But Carolyn May was far from satisfied by this permission. Child as she was, somehow she had gained an appreciation of the tragedy in the lives of Joseph Stagg and Amanda Parlow.

That cry the man had uttered when he sprang to Miss Parlow’s aid had been wrenched from the very depths of his being. Nor had Miss Amanda’s emotion been stirred only by the sight of a snake that was already dead when she had first seen it. Carolyn May had felt the woman’s hand tremble; there had been tears flooding her eyes when she kissed the little girl.

“I guess,” thought Carolyn May wisely, “that when two folks love each other and get angry, the love’s there just the same. Getting mad doesn’t kill it; it only makes ’em feel worse.

“Poor Uncle Joe! Poor Miss Amanda! Maybe if they’d just try to look up and look for brighter things, they’d get over being mad and be happy again.”

She felt that she would really like to advise with somebody on this point. Aunty Rose, of course, was out of the question. She knew that people often advised with their minister when they were in trouble, but to Carolyn May Mr. Driggs did not seem to be just the person with whom to discuss a love-affair. Kindly as the minister was disposed, he lacked the magnetism and sympathy that would urge one to take him into one’s confidence in such a delicate matter.

The little girl quite realised that it was delicate. She longed to help her uncle and Miss Amanda and to bring them together, but she felt, too, that whatever she did or said might do more harm than good.

When Uncle Joe and Carolyn May returned from this adventurous walk, Mr. Stagg went heavily into his own room, closed the door, and even locked it. He went over to the old-fashioned walnut bureau that stood against the wall between the two windows, and stood before it for some moments in an attitude of deep reflection. Finally, he drew his bunch of keys from his pocket and opened one of the two small drawers in the heavy piece of furniture—the only locked drawer there was.

It contained a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends—old school exercises, letters from his sister Hannah, an old-fashioned locket containing locks of his mother’s and of his father’s hair, broken trinkets, childish keepsakes. Indeed, such sentimental remembrances as Joseph Stagg possessed were secreted in this drawer.

From beneath all this litter he drew forth a tintype picture, faded now, but clear enough to show him the features of the two individuals printed on the sensitised plate.

He remembered as keenly as though it were yesterday when and how the picture had been made—at the county fair so many years ago. His own eyes looked out of the photograph proudly. They were much younger eyes than they were now.

And the girl beside him in the picture! Sweet as a wild rose, Mandy Parlow’s lovely, calm countenance promised all the beauty and dignity her matured womanhood had achieved.

“Mandy! Mandy!” he murmured over and over again. “Oh, Mandy! Why? Why?”

He held the tintype for a long, long time in his hand, gazing on it with eyes that saw the vanished years rather than the portraits themselves. Finally, he hid the picture away again, closed and locked the drawer with a sigh, and with slow steps left the room.