"If you want to wear shoe-strings when other folks wear ribbons, you can," said Abby Atkins. She walked away, switching, with unabated dignity in the midst of defeat, the draggled tail of her poor little dress. She had gone down like a cat; she was not in the least hurt except in her sense of justice; that was jarred to a still greater lack of equilibrium. She felt as if she had been floored by Providence in conjunction with a blue bow, and her very soul rose in futile rebellion. But, curiously enough, her personal ire against Ellen vanished. At the afternoon recess she gave Ellen the sound half of an old red Baldwin apple which she had brought for luncheon, and watched her bite into it, which Ellen did readily, for she was not a child to cherish enmity, with an odd triumph. "The other half ain't fit to eat, it's all wormy," said Abby Atkins, flinging it away as she spoke. "Then you ought to have kept this," Ellen cried out, holding towards her the half, minus one little bite. But Abby Atkins shook her head forcibly. "That was why I gave it to you," said she. "Say, didn't you never have to tie up your hair with a shoe-string?" Ellen shook her head, looking at her wonderingly. Then with a sudden impulse she tore off the blue ribbon from her curls. "Say, you take it," she said, "my mother won't care. I'd just as lief wear the shoe-string, honest." "I don't want your blue ribbon," Abby returned, stoutly; "a shoe-string is a good deal better to tie the hair with. I don't want your blue ribbon; I don't want no blue ribbon unless it's mine." "It would be yours if I give it to you," Ellen declared, with blue eyes of astonishment and consternation upon this very strange little girl. "No, it wouldn't," maintained Abby Atkins. But it ended in the two girls, with that wonderful and inexplicable adjustment of childhood into one groove after harsh grating on different levels, walking off together with arms around each other's waist, and after school began Ellen often felt a soft, cat-like pat on her head, and turned round with a loving glance at Abby Atkins. Ellen talked more about Abby Atkins than any other of the children when she got home, and while her mother looked at it all easily, her grandmother was doubtful. "There's others that I should rather have Ellen thick with," said she. "I 'ain't nothin' against the Atkinses, but they can't have been as well brought up as some, they have had so little to do with, and their mother's been ailin' so long." "Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with them that will be intimate with her," Eva said, rather bitterly. Eva was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother. She wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the skies fall. "I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim," she often told her sister, "but I can't help it."