Betsy
was to recite Barbara Frietchie, her first love in that school, but she
droned it over with none of her usual pleasure, her eyes on little
'Lias's smiling face, so unconscious of its dinginess.
At noon time the boys disappeared down toward the swimming-hole. They
often took a swim at noon and nobody thought anything about it on that
day. The little girls ate their lunch on their rock, mourning over the
failure of their plans, and scheming ways to meet the new obstacle.
Stashie suggested, "Couldn't your Aunt Abigail invite him up to your
house for supper and then give him a bath afterward?" But Betsy,
although she had never heard of treating a supper-guest in this way, was
sure that it was not possible. She shook her head sadly, her eyes on the
far-off gleam of white where the boys jumped up and down in their
swimming-hole. That was not a good name for it, because there was only
one part of it deep enough to swim in. Mostly it was a shallow bay in an
arm of the river, where the water was only up to a little boy's knees
and where there was almost no current. The sun beating down on it made
it quite warm, and even the first-graders' mothers allowed them to go
in. They only jumped up and down and squealed and splashed each other,
but they enjoyed that quite as much as Frank and Harry, the two seventh-
graders, enjoyed their swooping dives from the spring-board over the
pool.
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