Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/37

Rh shoved her along, slowly, inch by inch, possessing itself of her sunshine and enveloping her at last completely with cold, gray gloom.

It was usually winter-time when Reba recalled that lonely child on the steps. She wore a little gray astrakhan tippet around her neck, and her hands were tucked inside a little round, gray muff to match. She was watching the coasters. In the winter-time, every afternoon when the sliding was good, the school-children used to come in crowds to coast down Chestnut Street. They flashed by her at a terrific speed, on flat, battered little rafts, stomachs down, legs stretched out behind, like leaping frogs, screaming shrilly at the top of their lungs. Reba herself was not allowed to slide down Chestnut Street. It was dangerous.

"Besides the company! Mill riff-raff!" Aunt Augusta sniffed. "You've got your own back-yard, and your own sled. You ought to be contented." But it was a very empty back-yard, with a very tame little slope, and it took a long while for a single sled to wear a track down it alone.

Some children who lacked brothers and sisters were provided with cousins, who occasionally came and "spent the day." But not Reba. The only prolific families in Reba's neighborhood appeared to be despised foreigners. She had never had a playmate—she had never had a plaything with any red-blood in it, not even a canary-bird. Once in a while she used to steal out to the forbidden barn (a perilous place with holes a child might slip through) and shyly approach the stall occupied by her father's solitary horse, courageously reaching up craving fingers and poking