Page:Scarlet Sister Mary (1928).pdf/29

 now he was back, thin and bony, with new lines in his face; his clothes were worn out and his pockets empty, but his old happy grin was as bright as ever. No matter what Budda Ben and Maum Hannah said, July should never leave her again.

All the money he made was gone and June had to lend him some to go to town and buy his wedding clothes. He used part of it to buy Mary a present, a pair of hoop earrings to hide the cut in her ear. The big shining gold circles were wrapped up in a scarlet head-kerchief. When she stood in front of Maum Hannah's looking-glass and tied up her head with the kerchief as grown women do, and slipped the earrings through the holes which were bored in her ears long ago when she was a tiny child, to make her eye-sight strong, her fingers trembled with happiness. She had longed for earrings ever since she could remember and she had carefully kept the bored holes in her ears open with tiny straws so they could not grow up. July remembered that. Bless his heart!

"Who is dis all dressed up so fine," Budda Pen asked from the doorway. "Wid earrings a-danglin an' a head-kerchief makin' em look like: a grown 'oman? Who it is?"

Mary could hardly draw her eyes away from