Page:Ballinger Price--The Happy Venture.djvu/116

100 green, star-hung slip of sky outside the window. But somehow the seeing of it had made her cry again.

Next day she had swallowed her pride and asked Kirk to explain to her a few of the mysteries of the embossed letters. He was delighted, and picked the alphabet, here and there, from a page chosen at random in the big book. The dots slunk at once into quite sensibly ordered ranks, and Felicia perceived a reason, an excuse for their existence.

She learned half the alphabet in an hour, and picked out b and h and l joyfully from page after page. Three days later she was reading, "The cat can catch the mouse"—as thrilled as a scientist would be to discover a new principle of physics. Kirk was thrilled, also, and applauded her vigorously.

"But you're looking at it, and that's easier," he said. "And you're growner-up than me."

Felicia confessed that this was so.

And now what a stern task-mistress she had become! She knew all the long words in the hardest lessons, and more too. There was no escaping school-time; it was as bad as Miss Bolton. Except that she was Felicia—and that