She was eight years old, tall for her age, slender but strong, naturally graceful. Her hazel eyes were always dancing mischievously. She liked boys' games better than girls'. In her second week she induced several of the more daring girls to go with her to the pond below town and there engage in a raft-race with the boys. And when John Dumont, seeing that the girls' raft was about to win, thrust the one he was piloting into it and upset it, she was the only girl who did not scream at the shock of the sudden tumble into the water or rise in tears from the shallow, muddy bottom. She tried going barefooted; she was always getting bruised or cut in attempts--usually successful--at boys' recklessness; yet her voice was sweet and her manner toward others, gentle. She hid her face when Miss Stone whipped any one--more fearful far than the rise and fall of Miss Stone's ferule was the soaring and sinking of her broad, bristling eyebrows. From the outset John Dumont took especial delight in teasing her--John Dumont, the roughest boy in the school. He was seven years older than she, but was only in the Fourth Reader--a laggard in his studies because his mind was incurious about books and the like, was absorbed in games, in playing soldier and robber, in swimming and sledding, in orchard-looting and fighting. He was impudent and domineering, a bully but not a coward, good-natured when deferred to, the feared leader of a boisterous, imitative clique. Until Pauline came he had rarely noticed a girl--never except to play her some prank more or less cruel. After the adventure of the raft he watched Pauline afar off, revolving plans for approaching her without impairing his barbaric dignity, for subduing her without subduing himself to her. But he knew only one way of making friends, the only kind of friends he had or could conceive--loyal subjects, ruled through their weaknesses and fears. And as that way was to give the desired addition to his court a sound thrashing, he felt it must be modified somewhat to help him in his present conquest. He tied her hair to the back of her desk; he snowballed her and his sister Gladys home from school. He raided her playhouse and broke her dishes and--she giving desperate battle--fled with only the parents of her doll family. With Gladys shrieking for their mother, he shook her out of a tree in their yard, and it sprained her ankle so severely that she had to stay away from school for a month. The net result of a year's arduous efforts was that she had singled him out for detestation--this when her conquest of him was complete because she had never told on him, had never in her worst encounters with him shown the white feather.