Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/98

 Stephen's for Sunday school. There was nothing to do but put her into the class with Charlotte Green and Dotty Jackson and Gladys Blunt.

"What could I do?" wailed Mrs. Partridge to her husband. It is not the first time that a socially climbing lady has caused consternation in the church.

Opal was the only child who didn't have to go home when the shadows began to fall. She would drift up and down Chestnut Street, playing by herself, glimmering through the dark, singing her sweet shrill songs, and respectable children eating their milk toast, brushing their teeth, or saying their prayers heard her, and longed to be out there with her, playing in the night.

It was she who taught Jodie the naughty words that made Kate weep. But Opal had nothing to do with that darkest day of all when Jodie told a lie.

Kate, squeezing warm rain from the rubber bulb sprinkler on the plants in the parlor bay window, saw that a cluster of fragrant waxy buds had been knocked off the lemon tree, a gift of other days from the Cedarmere conservatory, and burst into lamentations.

"Now look at that! Those lovely buds, just as they were coming out! I've been watching them and watching them, and now look at them! Now how in the world did that happen? Could that bad little cat have climbed up there? Mercy! I wouldn't have had that happen for the world! Look, Lizzie! This lovely bunch of buds! Now how do you suppose that happened?"