“Doesn’t my little girl want anything to eat to-night?” she asked.

Alma turned and opened her eyes.

“Guess which it is,” went on Mrs. Driscoll, smiling.  “Breakfast or supper.”

“Oh, have you come?” Alma sat up.  She clasped her arms around her mother.  “Please don’t make me go to school any more,” she said, the big sob with which she went to sleep rising again in her throat.

“Why, what has happened, dear?” Mrs. Driscoll grew serious.

“I don’t want to tell you, mother, only please let me stay at home.  I’ll study just as hard.”

“You’d be lonely here all day, Alma.”

“I want to be lonely,” returned the little girl earnestly.

Mrs. Driscoll looked very sober.  “Let’s sit down at the table,” she said, “for I have your boiled egg all ready.”

Alma took her place opposite her mother.  Supper was usually the bright spot in the day, but this evening there seemed nothing but clouds.

“I want to hear all about it, Alma, but you’d better eat first,” said Mrs. Driscoll, as she poured the tea.

“It isn’t anything very much,” replied the little girl, torn between the longing for sympathy and unwillingness to give her mother pain; “only there aren’t any lonely children in that school.  Everybody has some one she likes to play with.”

A pang of understanding went through the mother’s heart, so tender that she forced a smile.

“Oh, my dearie,” she said, “you remind me of the old song,—­

    ’Every lassie has her laddie,
    Nane, they say, have I,
    But all the lads, they smile on me,
    When comin’ thro’ the rye.’

If my Alma smiles on all the children, they’ll all smile on her.”

Alma shook her head.  It was too great an undertaking to explain all those daily experiences of longing and disappointment to her mother.  The child’s throat grew so full of the sob that she could not swallow the nice egg.

“This is Valentine’s Day,” she said, with an effort.  “They had a box in school.  Everybody got pretty ones but me.  They sent me a ‘comic.’”

She swallowed bravely between the sentences, but big tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed on the gingham apron.

“Well, wasn’t it meant to make you laugh, dearie?”

“N-no.  It was—­was a hateful one.  I—­I can’t tell you.”

A line came in Mrs. Driscoll’s forehead.  Her swift thought pictured the scene only too vividly.  She swallowed, too.

“Silly pictures can’t hurt us, Alma,” she said.

“But please don’t make me go back,” returned the child earnestly.  “I cried and ran away, and I know all the other children laughed, and, oh, mother, I can’t go back!” She was sobbing again, now, and trying to dry her tears with her apron.

Mrs. Driscoll’s lips pressed firmly together to keep from quivering.

“Mother,” said Alma brokenly, as soon as she could speak again, “when do you think father will come home?”