Page:Carroll Rankin--Dandelion Cottage.djvu/197

 Rh  a few moments and then went to sleep in the sunshine—he, at least, cherished no particular grudge against the girls and probably by that time he recognised them as neighbours.

Then Laura perched herself on one of the square posts of the dividing fence and began to sing in her high, rasping, exasperating voice, a song that was almost too personal to be pleasant. It had taken Laura almost two hours to compose it, some days previously, and fully another hour to commit it to memory, but she sang it now in an off-hand, hap-hazard way that led the girls to suppose that she was making it up as she went along. It ran thus:

Of course it was quite impossible to read even a thrillingly interesting book with rude