that’s why her mother—I mean she that isn’t—dresses her in checked aperns? That’s what orphans—”

The shorn head dug deeper. A soft groan escaped Margaret’s lips. This very minute, now while she crouched in the grass,—oh, if she put out her hands and felt she would feel the checks! She had been to an orph—to a place once with Moth—with Her and seen the aprons herself. They were all—all checked.

At home, folded in a beautiful pile, there were all the others. There was the pink-checked one and the brown-checked one and the prettiest one of all, the one with teenty little white checks marked off with buff. The one she should feel if she put out her hand was a blue-checked.

Margaret drove her hands deep into the matted grass; she would not put them out. It was—it was terrible! Now she understood it all. She remembered—things. They crowded—with capital T’s, Things,—up to her and pointed their fingers at her, and smiled dreadful smiles at her, and whispered to one another about her. They sat down on her and jounced up and down, till she gasped for breath.

The teacher’s bell rang crisply and the voices changed to scampering feet. But Margaret crouched on in the sweet, moist grass behind the wall. She stayed there a week—a month—a year,—or was it only till the night chill stole into her bones and she crept away home?