Involuntarily I clinch my hands.

"You little coward!" I exclaim, "it is you who should be brought down! You are too mean to live."

He laughs brutally, and goes on, whistling indifferently, while I pick up the dead squirrel lying at my feet.

I find myself crying, before I know it. Not alone with pity for the squirrel; something else is hurting me.

"Is this the masculine nature?" I ask some one--I don't know whom.

Perhaps it is one of those questions which are flung upward, in a blind kind of way, and which God sometimes catches and answers.

"Are they made this way? Was it meant that they should be brutal?"

I am still holding the squirrel and thinking, when I hear my name, and turning see my neighbor over the way, Mrs. Purblind's brother, standing near me.

"Good morning, Mr. Chance," I say, rather coldly.

All men are hateful to me at that moment; to my mind they all have that boy's nature, though they keep it under cover until they know you well, or have you in their power.

"The little fellow is dead, I suppose," he said.

"Yes," I answer with a sob which I turn away to conceal. I don't wish to excite his mirth. Of course he would only see something laughable in my grief, and he couldn't dream what I am thinking about.