Phyllis | Page 3

heart to forgive me for taking her home, and asking
God to make her love the cottage as I would like to be let to love her.
To think that I have to sleep in her great-grandmother's four-poster bed
that Roxanne has always slept in! I have to pray hard to be forgiven for
it and to be able to endure the doing of it. Good-night!
This has been a very curious and happy kind of day, Louise, and I feel
excited and queer. I have had a long talk with Roxanne Byrd over our
garden fence, and she is just as wonderful as I thought she was going to
be. A person's dream about another person is so apt to be a kind of
misfit, but Roxanne slipped into mine about her just as if it had been
made for her.

The little Byrd boy is named Lovelace Peyton for his two grandfathers,
and he looks and sounds just like he had come out of a beautiful book;
but he doesn't act accordingly. He is slim and rosy and dimply, with
yellow curls just mopped all over his head, and he has blue eyes the
color that the sky is hardly ever; but from what Roxanne says about
him I hardly see how he will live to grow up. He falls in and sits in and
down and on and breaks and eats things in the most terrible fashion,
and he has all sorts of creeps and crawls in his pocket all of the time.
He pulls bugs and worms apart and tries to put them together again;
and he choked the old rooster nearly to death trying to poke down his
throat some bread and mud made up into pills.
That is what I ran to help Roxanne about, and the poor old chicken was
gaping and gasping terribly. I held him while she made Lovelace
Peyton put his finger down in the bill and pull up the wad he had been
trying to push down.
"That old rooster have got rheumatiz, Roxy, and now he'll die with no
pill for it," said Lovelace, as he worked his dirty little finger down after
the mud and bread; but he got it out and the poor old chicken hopped
off with all his feathers ruffled up and stretching his neck as if to try it.
"Oh, Lovey, please don't kill the chickens," Roxanne said in a tone of
real pleading.
"I don't never kill nothing, Roxy," he answered indignantly. "If a thing
can't get well from me doctoring it, it dies 'cause it wants to. Since
Uncle Pomp let me put that mixtry of nice mud and brick dust on his
shoe he don't suffer with his frost-bit heel no more. He's going to stop
limping next week if I put it on every day. I'm going to pound another
piece of brick right now," and he went around the house with the
darlingest little lope, because he always rides a stick horse, which
prances most of the time.
"Oh, isn't he awful?" said Roxanne; but there was the kind of pride in
her voice and the kind of look in her eyes that I would have if I had a
little brother like that, even if he was so dirty that he would have to be
handled with tongs.

"He's so awful I wish he was mine," I answered, and then we both
laughed.
I had never thought, leather Louise, that I would have a nice laugh like
that with a girl who was only treating me kindly to keep from the sin of
spite. It was hard to believe that Roxanne didn't really like me when she
went on to tell me some of the dreadful funny things Lovelace Peyton
does almost every hour. I forgot about her feeling for me and was
laughing at her description of how she came home from school one day
and found old Uncle Pompey, who is as black and old as a human
being can be and is all the servant Roxanne has to help her, cooking
dinner with a piece of newspaper pasted in strips all over his face,
which was Lovelace Peyton's remedy for neuralgia.
But just as I was enjoying myself so as to be almost unconscious I saw
Belle and Mamie Sue and Tony Luttrell coming around the corner of
the street past the front gate of Byrd Mansion and down toward the
cottage. Nobody knows how hard it is for me to see every nice body
my own age pass right by my gate in a procession to see Roxanne when
I can't go, too.
Tony didn't see me standing by the garden fence, and he gave the funny
little whistle that he calls the Raccoon whistle