"Don't forget me, kids!" she panted, her voice thick with tears. "I--I want to tell you I love you all, and I'm sorry for every mean thing I ever did to any of you, and I hope you all get adopted by rich papas and mamas and have ice cream every day! Goodby, kids! Goodby!"
"Kiss me goodby, Sal-lee!" a little whining voice pleaded.
Sally stooped and pressed her lips, through the fence opening, against the babyish mouth of little Eloise Durant, the newest and most forlorn orphan of them all.
"Me, too, Sal-lee! Me, too! We won't have nobody to play-act for us now!" Betsy wailed, pressing her tear-stained face against the wire.
A little later, when Sally was seated primly beside Clem Carson, jolting rapidly down the road that led past the orphanage toward the business district of the city, the farmer nudged her in the ribs and chuckled:
"You're quite a kissing-bug, ain't you, Sally? How about a little kiss for your new boss?"
Sally had shrunk as far away from Clem Carson as the seat of the "flivver" permitted, phrases from Mrs. Stone's embarrassed, vague, terrifying warnings boiling and churning in her mind: "Keep your body pure"--"mustn't let men take any liberties with you"--"you're a big girl now, things you ought to know"--"if you're led astray, it will be due to evils in your own nature"--
She suddenly loathed herself, her budding, curving young body that she had taken such innocent delight in as she bathed for her journey. She wanted to shrink and shrink and shrink, until she was a little girl again, too young to know "the facts of life," as Mrs. Stone, blushing and embarrassed, had called the half-truths she had told Sally. She wanted to climb over the door of the car, drop into the hot dust of the road, and run like a dog-chased rabbit back into the safety of the Home. There were no men there--no queer, different male beings who would want to "take liberties"--
"My land! Scared of me?" Clem Carson chuckled. "You poor little chicken! Don't mind me, Sally. I don't mean no harm, teasing you for a kiss. Land alive! I got a girl of my own, ain't I? Darned proud of her, too, and I'd cut the heart outa any man that tried to take advantage of her. Ain't got no call to be scared of me, Sally."