Free The Bad Seed by William March Page B

medal could possibly have come off by itself. I pinned the medal on him myself, and the clasp was strong and tight.”
    She wiped her face with a damp towel, and in the silence, Christine said softly, “I know. I know so well.”
    “The men simply didn’t look hard enough,” said Mrs. Daigle. “They said they’d looked over and over, but I told them to go back and look again. There was such a wonderful bond between us. We were so close to each other. He said I was his only sweetheart, and that he was going to marry me when he grew up. He obeyed me completely. He wouldn’t even go to the corner until he’d discussed the matter with me, and I’d told him it was all right. He’d want to be buried with his medal. I know that without being told. I want to please him in every way I can— Will you tell the men to please look for the medal again?”

FOUR
    When Christine returned home, Rhoda was curled up in one of the big chairs studying her Sunday school lesson for the following day, her lips shaping aloud the text that she read. She went each Sunday, with the little Truby girls who lived across the street, to the Presbyterian church on Lowell Street; and she was ardent in study, and faithful in attendance as well. Her teacher, Miss Belle Blackwell, believed in encouraging both attendance at her class and seriousness of purpose in her pupils, through a series of small rewards. Each time a child came promptly to theSunday school room when the second bell rang, and knew the lesson printed on the back of the illustrated card which had been distributed in class the previous Sunday, she surrendered the card temporarily, and Miss Blackwell pasted a golden butterfly on it as a testimonial of piety and application. When a child had twelve of these cards with their twelve golden butterflies, she was given “a pleasant and instructive reward” in return.
    The lesson this particular Sunday was concerned with one of the bloodier precepts of the Old Testament; it centered around the damnation and most cruel destruction of those who had been unable, or unwilling, to conform blindly to some Hebraic party line of that day; and when Christine sat quietly beside her daughter under the lamp, her mind still fixed on the suffering of the Daigles, Rhoda passed the card, on which she was to be examined next morning, to her, and asked that her mother question her about it. Christine read the text slowly, shook her head, and thought:
Is there nothing but violence everywhere? Is there no real peace anywhere in the world?
She wondered if her daughter should be taught such things, but sighing in a gentle protest, feeling that others surely knew more about these matters of faith than she did, she asked her daughter the questions required. Rhoda had learned her lesson well, and, smiling her charming, shallow smile, she nodded in triumph, and, going to her treasure box, she returned with the eleven butterfly-starred cards she’d already earned.
    “I’m sure to get a prize tomorrow,” she said. “I’m just
sure
to.”
    “What do you think it will be? Will it be something quite nice?”
    “It’ll be a book, I guess,” said Rhoda. “Miss Belle almost always gives a book that improves the mind.”
    The anticipation of possession was already in her face, and, gathering her cards together, she returned them to their original place in her dresser drawer.
    Later, Mrs. Penmark read the afternoon paper, and went to bed early; but she found it hard to sleep, for Hortense Daigle’s tear-stained, disintegrating face kept coming in the dark before her eyes; but at last she did fall asleep, and had a dream which disturbed her, but which she could not remember afterward. She got up earlier than she usually did on a Sunday morning, the liquid, triumphant sound of church bells in her ears, and fixed breakfast for herself and her child.
    Later that day, when Rhoda returned from church, she had her prize tucked under her arm; it was a copy of
Elsie