chocolate ice cream and orange water ice from Goff's every Sunday. This seemed to her such bad news that she could hardly bear to tell it to them. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, feeling as much of a child as they, wanting to ask their advice.
Jodie had been stamping himself with the Brownie rubber stamps and the magenta ink pad Carrie Pyne had given him. Carrie's presents! How Kate dreaded them! The box of tools, the wild little kitten that ran up the curtains and clung there, spitting and bristling, now these Brownies, all over the house, under curtains, behind chairs at first, then out in the open, on white door panels, among the petals of wall-paper roses, so that there had been prohibitions and tears. Now there was the Brownie dude in the middle of Jodie's forehead, the Brownie policeman on the back of one hand, and the Chinaman Brownie on the other, which was also ornamented with a large lead horseshoe ring from one of the crackers at Laddie Baylow's birthday party. From the buttonhole of his Russian blouse a sweet pea hung a long mouse tail of green stem. Now where had he gotten that on this day of icicles, Kate wondered. Perhaps he had been down the hill calling on Mr. Clark at the greenhouse. What a funny, mysterious little boy he was, living his own life, safe in his own world, generally. She wanted to take the round face between the palms of her hands, to kiss the top of the silky head with its plume of cowlick. What did the future hold for her little boy? What weapons had
