She looked hard at it, then she pulled her black braid over her shoulder and felt of the hard shoe-string knot, and frowned with an ugly frown of envy and bitterest injury, and asked herself the world-wide and world-old question as to the why of inequality, and, though it was based on such trivialities as blue ribbons and shoe-strings, it was none the less vital to her mind.

She would have loved, have gloried, to pull off that blue ribbon, put it on her own black braid, and tie up those yellow curls with her own shoe-string with a vicious yank of security.

But all the time it was not so much because she wanted the ribbon as because she did not wish to be slighted in the distribution of things.

Abby Atkins cared no more for personal ornament than a wild cat, but she wanted her just allotment of the booty of the world.

So at recess she watched her chance.