Davy's voice sank to a frightened whisper as he rolled the dread word over his tongue in unconscious imitation of Molly. He was quivering with excitement, and his cheeks were unusually red. He had talked more in the few minutes than he often did in days.
"Why, Davy, what's the matter?" cried Betty. "What do you mean by abracadabra?"
"Hush! Don't say it so loud," he begged earnestly. "It's Molly's hoodoo word. Bradley says she can conjure you with it, same as coloured folks when they put a rabbit's foot on you. I had to tell, 'cause I'm afraid Molly's going to do something mean to you."
"Does your mother know that she tells you those silly things?" demanded Betty, turning on him quickly. But Davy had lost his tongue, now that his confession was made, and only shook his head in reply.
"Then don't listen to her any more, Davy boy," she said, taking him by the ears and kissing him playfully, first on one dimpled cheek and then on the other. "Poor Molly doesn't know any better, and she must have lived with dreadful people before she went to the orphan asylum. You stay with Lloyd and me, after this, and don't have anything more to do with her when she tells you such stories."
"That's just what she said you'd do," said Davy, finding his voice again. "She said that you and that other girl would be stuck up and wouldn't play with her, or let us either, and that she'd always be left out of everything. But she'd get even with you for coming in with your high and mighty airs and fine clothes to turn us against her."
"That's the silliest thing I ever heard," answered Betty, indignantly. Then a puzzled look crept into her brown eyes, as she stood pouring out the water to wash her face. "I'll ask godmother about it," she said to herself. "She'll tell us how we ought to treat her."
But there was no opportunity that evening. Molly sat down to the supper-table with them, much to the surprise of the Little Colonel, unused to the primitive customs of farm life, where no social difference is made between those who are served and those who do the serving. Remembering her mother's little sermon, she did not show her surprise by the smallest change of expression.
After supper Betty offered to help with the dishes as usual, but her cousin Hetty sent her away, saying it would not do to soil her pretty travelling dress; that she was company now, and to run away and entertain Lloyd. So Betty, with a sigh of relief, went back to the porch, where Mr. Appleton, with Pudding in his lap, was talking with Mrs. Sherman.
Betty hated dish-washing, and after her long holiday at the house party it seemed doubly hard to go back to such unpleasant duties. She did not see the swift jealous look that followed her from Molly's keen eyes, or the sullen pout that settled on the older girl's lips, as, left to herself, she rattled the cups and plates recklessly, in her envious mood.
Out on the porch Betty sank into a comfortable rocking-chair, and sat looking up at the stars. "Isn't it sweet and still out here, godmother?" she asked, after awhile. "I love to hear that owl hooting away off in the woods, and listen to the pine-trees whispering that way, and the frogs croaking down in the meadow pond."
"Oh, I don't," cried the Little Colonel, with something like a sob in her voice, as she nestled her head closer against her mother's shoulder. "It makes me feel as lonesome as when Mom Beck sings 'Fa'well, my dyin' friends.' I think they're the most doleful sounds I evah heard."
Presently, when Mr. Appleton went in to carry the sleepy baby to bed, the Little Colonel put her arms around her mother's neck, whispering, "Oh, mothah, I wish we were back at Locust. I'm so homesick and disappointed in the place. Can't we go home in the mawnin'?"
"I think my little girl is so tired and sleepy that she doesn't know what she wants," whispered Mrs. Sherman, in reply. "Come, let me take you to bed. You'll think differently in the morning. Do you remember the old song?
"'Colours seen by candle-light
Never look the same by day.'"
CHAPTER IV
"TO BARLEY-BRIGHT."
The next few days went by happily for the Little Colonel, for Betty took her to all her favourite haunts, and kept her entertained from morning till night. Once they stayed all day in the woods below the barn, building a playhouse at the base of a great oak-tree, with carpets of moss, and cups and saucers made of acorns.
Scott and Bradley joined them, and for once played peaceably, building a furnace in the ravine with some flat stones and an old piece of stove pipe. There they cooked their dinner. Davy was sent to raid the garden and spring-house, and even Lee and Morgan were allowed a place at the feast, when one came in with a hatful of guinea eggs that he had found in the orchard, and the other loaned his new red wheelbarrow, to add to the housekeeping outfit.
"Isn't this fun!" exclaimed the Little Colonel, as she watched Betty, who stood over the furnace with a very red face, scrambling the eggs in an old pie-pan. "I bid to be the cook next time we play out here, and I'm going to make a furnace like this when I go back to Locust."
High above them, up the hill, on the back porch of the farmhouse, Molly stood ironing sheets and towels. Whenever she glanced down into the shady hollow, she could see Lloyd's pink dress fluttering along the ravine, or Betty's white sunbonnet bobbing up from behind the rocks. The laughing voices and the shouts of the boys came tantalisingly to her ears, and the old sullen pout settled on her face as she listened.
"It isn't fair that I should have to work all day long while they are off having a good time," she muttered, slapping an iron angrily down on the stove. "I s'pose they think that because I'm so big I oughtn't to care about playing; but I couldn't help growing so fast. If I am nearly as big as Mrs. Appleton, that doesn't keep me from feeling like a little girl inside. I'm only a year older than Scott. I hate them! I wish that little Sherman girl would fall into a brier patch and scratch her face, and that a hornet would sting Betty Lewis smack in the mouth!"
By and by a tear sizzled down on the hot iron in her hand. "It isn't fair!" she sobbed again, "for them to have everything and me nothing, not even to know where my poor little sister is. Maybe somebody's beating her this very minute, or she is shut up in a dark closet crying for me." With that thought, all the distressing scenes that had made her past life miserable began to crowd into her mind, and the tears sizzled faster and faster on the hot iron, as she jerked it back and forth over a long towel.
There had been beatings and dark closets for Molly many a time before she was rescued by the orphan asylum, and the great fear of her life was that there was still the same cruel treatment for the little sister who had not been rescued, but who had been hidden away by their drunken father when the Humane Society made its search for her.
Three years had passed since they were lost from each other. Molly was only eleven then, and Dot, although nearly seven, was such a tiny, half-starved little thing that she seemed only a baby in her sister's eyes. Many a night, when the wind moaned in the chimney, or the rats scampered in the walls, Molly had started up out of a sound sleep, staring fearfully into the darkness, thinking that she had heard Dot calling to her. Then suddenly remembering that Dot was too far away to make her hear, no matter how wildly she might call, she had buried her face in her pillow, and sobbed and sobbed until she fell asleep.
The matron of the asylum knew why she often came down in the morning with red eyes and swollen face, and the knowledge made her more patient with the wayward girl. Nobody taxed her patience more than Molly, with her unhappy moods, her outbursts of temper, and her suspicious, jealous disposition. She loved to play, and yelled and ran like some wild creature, whenever she had a chance, climbing the highest trees, making daring leaps from forbidden heights, and tearing her clothes into ribbons. But she rebelled at having to work, and in all the time she was at the asylum the matron had found only one lovable trait in her. It was her affection for the little lost sister that made