“I’m not! I’m not!” Julie panted. “It wasn’t that--I--I had to do it.” “Why? Why did you have to? Quit shaking, I tell you!” “I had to because I was scared to,” Julie confessed miserably. But this was beyond Henr’etta’s comprehension. It was really beyond Julie’s own. She did not know that she was already beginning to feel herself caught in the terrifying net of her own fears, and had made a futile leap for freedom. She only knew that something had made her do a dreadful thing at which all the children had laughed, just as she had known they would. “Oh here, don’t cry, Julie!” Henr’etta whispered hastily. “For the mercy sakes! Don’t go and cry now, right before the whole school. Here, look at the geography lesson--here, listen: ‘Principal rivers in West Virginia’--Oh, for goodness sake!” For, despite the principal rivers, Julie had dropped her head upon the desk in front of her, bursting into a flood of tears; and again the eyes of all the school stabbed straight through her body, and down into her soul. * * * * * One may also see this fragile thread of life running back into Julie’s babyhood, mothered by her delicate and shrinking mother, and fathered by her big blustering father. Those were the days when Mr. Rose kept a small shop in the village, and when Julie’s earliest baby recollections were concerned with the many-colored things in the shop, and the mingled smell of raisins, tobacco, and peppermint candy, together with the dreadful tradition that a witch lived in the ginger-cake barrel, ready to snap out at a little girl who even so much as thought of helping herself in passing. That appeared to be the reason for their being called ginger-snaps. But big and boastful as her father was, he was not a success at storekeeping, and by the time little Julie was five or six, her mother was taking table boarders “to help out.” She had been a school-teacher from one of the smaller cities in Virginia, and had trained herself to a rather prim mode of speech. Julie usually spoke as she did, but in moments of stress she was apt to break away to the mountain phraseology of her father’s people.