"But that will be nice, Sally!" Miss Pond gushed. "You will have a real home, with plenty to eat and maybe some nice little dresses to wear, and make new friends-"

"Yes, Miss Pond," Sally nodded, held thrall by twelve years of enforced acquiescence. "But, oh, Miss Pond, I'd been hoping it was-my father-or my mother, or somebody I belong to-"

"Why, Sally, you haven't a father, dear, and your mother-But, mercy me, I mustn't be running on like this," Miss Pond caught herself up hastily, a fearful eye on the closed door.

"Miss Pond," Sally pleaded, "won't you please, please tell me something about myself before I go away? I know you're not allowed to, but oh, Miss Pond, please! It's so cruel not to know anything! Please, Miss Pond! You've always been so sweet to me-"

The little touch of flattery did it, or maybe it was the pathos in those wide, blue eyes.

"It's against the rules," Miss Pond wavered. "But-I know how you feel, Sally dear. I was raised in the Home myself, not knowing-. I can't get your card out of the files now; Mrs. Stone might come and catch me. But I'll make some excuse to come up to the locker room when you're getting your things together. Oh-" she broke off. "I was just telling Sally how nice it will be for her to have a real home, Mrs. Stone."

Mrs. Stone closed the door firmly, her eyes stern upon Sally. "Of course it will be nice. And Sally must be properly appreciative. I did not at all like your manner to Mr. Carson, Sally. But run along now and pack.

You may take your Sunday dress and shoes, and one of your every-day ginghams. Mr. Carson will provide your clothes. His daughter is about your age, and he says her last year's dresses will be nicer than anything you've ever had."

"Yes, Mrs. Stone," Sally ducked her head and sidled out of the door, but before it closed she exchanged a fleet, meaningful look with Miss Pond.

"I'm going to _know_!" Sally whispered to herself, as she ran down the long, narrow corridor. "I'm going to know! About my mother!" And color swept over her face, performing the miracle that changed her from a colorless little orphan into a near-beauty.

Because she was leaving the orphanage for a temporary new home on the Carson farm, Sally was permitted to take her regular Sat.u.r.day night bath that afternoon. In spite of her terror of the future, the girl who had never known any home but a state orphan asylum felt a thrill of adventure as she splashed in a painted tin tub, gloriously alone, unhurried by clamorous girls waiting just outside.

The cold water-there was no hot water for bathing from April first to October first-made her skin glow and tingle. As she dried herself on a ragged wisp of grayish-white Turkish toweling, Sally surveyed her slim, white body with shy pride. Shorn of the orphanage uniform she might have been any pretty young girl budding into womanhood, so slim and rounded and pinky-white she was.

"I guess I'm kinda pretty," Sally whispered to herself, as she thrust her face close to the small, wavery mirror that could not quite succeed in destroying her virginal loveliness. "Sweet sixteen and-never been kissed," she smiled to herself, then bent forward and gravely laid her pink, deliciously curved lips against the mirrored ones.

Then, in a panic lest she be too late to see kind Miss Pond, she jerked on the rest of her clothing.

"Dear Sally, how sweet you look!" Miss Pond clasped her hands in admiration as Sally slipped, breathless, into the locker-room that contained the clothes of all the girls of her dormitory.

"Did you bring the card that tells all about me-and my mother?" Sally brushed the compliment aside and demanded in an eager whisper.

"No, dearie, I was afraid Mrs. Stone might want it to make an entry about Mr. Carson's taking you for the summer, but I copied the data. You go ahead with your packing while I tell you what I found out," Miss Pond answered nervously, but her pale gray eyes were sparkling with pleasure in her mild little escapade.

Sally unlocked her own particular locker with the key that always hung on a string about her neck, but almost immediately she whirled upon Miss Pond, her eyes imploring. "It won't take me a minute to pack, Miss Pond.

Please go right on and tell me!"

"Well, Sally, I'm afraid there isn't much to tell." Miss Pond smoothed a folded bit of paper apologetically. "The record says you were brought here May 9, 1912, just twelve years ago, by a woman who said you were her daughter. She gave your birthday as June 2, 1908, and her name as Mrs. Nora Ford, a widow, aged 28-"

"Oh, she's young!" Sally breathed ecstatically. Then her face clouded, as her nimble brain did a quick sum in mental arithmetic. "But she'd be forty now, wouldn't she? Forty seems awfully old-"

"Forty is comparatively young, Sally!" Miss Pond, who was looking regretfully back upon forty herself, said rather tartly. "But let me hurry on. She gave poverty and illness as her reasons for asking the state to take care of you. She said your father was dead."

"Oh, poor mother!" A shadow flitted across Sally's delicate face; quick tears for the dead father and the ill, poverty-stricken mother filmed her blue eyes.

"The state accepted you provisionally, and shortly afterward sent an investigator to check up on her story," Miss Pond went on. "The investigator found that the woman, Mrs. Ford, had left the city-it was Stanton, thirty miles from here-and that no one knew where she had gone.

From that day to this we have had no word from the woman who brought you here. She was a mystery in Stanton, and has remained a mystery until now. I'm sorry, Sally, that I can't tell you more."

"Oh!" Sally's sharp cry was charged with such pain and disappointment that Miss Pond took one of the little clenched fists between her own thin hands, not noticing that the slip of paper fluttered to the floor.

"She didn't write to know how I was, didn't care whether I lived or died! I wish I hadn't asked! I thought maybe there was somebody, someone who loved me-"

"Remember she was sick and poor, Sally. Maybe she went to a hospital suddenly and-and died. But there was no report in any papers of the state of her death," Miss Pond added conscientiously. "You mustn't grieve, Sally. You're nearly grown up. You'll be leaving us when you're eighteen, unless you want to stay on as an a.s.sistant matron or as a teacher-"

"Oh, no, no!" Sally cried. "I-I'll pack now, Miss Pond. And thank you a million times for telling me, even if it did hurt."

In her distress Miss Pond trotted out of the locker-room without a thought for the bit of paper on which she had scribbled the memorandum of Sally's pitifully meager life history. But Sally had not forgotten it. She s.n.a.t.c.hed it from the floor and pinned it to her "body waist," a vague resolution forming in her troubled heart.

When five o'clock came Sally Ford was waiting in the office for Clem Carson, her downcast eyes fixed steadily upon the small brown paper parcel in her lap, color staining her neck and cheeks and brow, for Mrs.

Stone, stiffly, awkwardly but conscientiously, was doing her inst.i.tutional best to arm the state's charge for her first foray into the outside world.

"And so, Sally, I want you to remember to-to keep your body pure and your mind clean," Mrs. Stone summed up, her strong, heavy face almost as red as Sally's own. "You're too young to go out with young men, but you'll be meeting the hired hands on the farm. You-you mustn't let them take liberties of any kind with you. We try to give you girls in the Home a sound religious and moral training, and if-if you're led astray it will be due to the evils in your own nature and not to lack of proper Christian training. You understand me, Sally?" she added severely.

"Yes, Mrs. Stone," Sally answered in a smothered voice.

Sally's hunted eyes glanced wildly about for a chance of escape and lighted upon the turning k.n.o.b of the door. In a moment Clem Carson was edging in, his face slightly flushed, a tell-tale odor of whisky and cloves on his breath.

"Little lady all ready to go?" he inquired with a suspiciously jovial laugh, which made Sally crouch lower in her chair. "Looking pretty as a picture, too! With two pretty girls in my house this summer, reckon I'll have to stand guard with a shotgun to keep the boys away."

Word had gone round that Sally Ford was leaving the Home for the summer, and as Clem Carson and his new unpaid hired girl walked together down the long cement walk to where his car was parked at the curb, nearly three hundred little girls, packed like a herd of sheep in the wire-fenced playground adjoining the front lawn, sang out goodbys and good wishes.

"Goodby Sal-lee! Hope you have a good time!"

"Goodby, Sal-lee! Write me a letter, Sal-lee!" "Goodby, goodby!"

Sally, waving her Sunday handkerchief, craned her neck for a last sight of those blue-and-white-ginghamed little girls, the only playmates and friends she had in the world. There were tears in her eyes, and, queerly, for she thought she hated the Home, a stab of homesickness shooting through her heart. How safe they were, there in the playground pen! How simple and sheltered life was in the Home, after all! Suddenly she knew, somehow, that it was the last time she would ever see it, or the children.

Without a thought for the iron-clad "Keep off the gra.s.s" rule, Sally turned and ran, fleetly, her little figure as graceful as a fawn's, over the thick velvet carpet of the lawn. When she reached the high fence that separated her from the other orphans, she spread her arms, as if she would take them all into her embrace.

"Don't forget me, kids!" she panted, her voice thick with tears. "I-I want to tell you I love you all, and I'm sorry for every mean thing I ever did to any of you, and I hope you all get adopted by rich papas and mamas and have ice cream every day! Goodby, kids! Goodby!"

"Kiss me goodby, Sal-lee!" a little whining voice pleaded.

Sally stooped and pressed her lips, through the fence opening, against the babyish mouth of little Eloise Durant, the newest and most forlorn orphan of them all.

"Me, too, Sal-lee! Me, too! We won't have n.o.body to play-act for us now!" Betsy wailed, pressing her tear-stained face against the wire.

CHAPTER II

A little later, when Sally was seated primly beside Clem Carson, jolting rapidly down the road that led past the orphanage toward the business district of the city, the farmer nudged her in the ribs and chuckled:

"You're quite a kissing-bug, ain't you, Sally? How about a little kiss for your new boss?"

Sally had shrunk as far away from Clem Carson as the seat of the "flivver" permitted, phrases from Mrs. Stone's embarra.s.sed, vague, terrifying warnings boiling and churning in her mind: "Keep your body pure"-"mustn't let men take any liberties with you"-"you're a big girl now, things you ought to know"-"if you're led astray, it will be due to evils in your own nature"-

She suddenly loathed herself, her budding, curving young body that she had taken such innocent delight in as she bathed for her journey. She wanted to shrink and shrink and shrink, until she was a little girl again, too young to know "the facts of life," as Mrs. Stone, blushing and embarra.s.sed, had called the half-truths she had told Sally. She wanted to climb over the door of the car, drop into the hot dust of the road, and run like a dog-chased rabbit back into the safety of the Home.

There were no men there-no queer, different male beings who would want to "take liberties"-