What did they mean?  What had happened to Dotty Dimple, that her own father and mother did not know her?

She looked down at the skirt of her dress, at her gaiters, at her little bare hands, to make sure no wicked fairy had changed her.  Not that she suspected any such thing.  She understood but too well what her father and mother meant.  They knew her, but had not chosen to recognize her, because they were displeased.

Dotty’s little heart, the swelling of which had net gone down at all during the night, now ached terribly.  She covered her face with her hands, and groaned aloud.

“Don’t,” said Mandoline, touched with pity.  “They no business to treat you so.”

“O, Lina, don’t you talk!  You don’t know anything about it.  You never had such a father’n mother’s they are!  And now they won’t let me come into the house!”

This wail of despair would have melted Mrs. Parlin if she could have heard it.  It was only because she thought it necessary to be severe that she had consented to do as her husband advised, and turn coldly away from her dear little daughter.  Dotty was a loving child, in spite of her disobedience, and this treatment was almost more than she could bear.  She found no consolation in talking with Lina, for she knew Lina could not understand her feelings.

“She hasn’t any Susy and Prudy at her house, nor no anything” thought Dotty.  “If I lived with Mrs. Rosenberg and that dog, I’d want to be locked out; I’d ask if I couldn’t.  But, O, my darling mamma!  I’ve been naughty too many times!  When I’d been naughty fifty, sixty, five hundred times, then she forgave me; but now she can’t forgive me any more; it isn’t possible.”

Dotty staggered against a girl who was drawing a baby-carriage, but recovered herself.

“It isn’t possible to forgive me any more.  She told me not to go on the water, and I went.  She told me not to have temper, and I had it.  Every single thing she’s told me not to do, I always went and did it.  She said, ‘I do not wish you to play with Lina Rosenberg;’ and then I went right off and played with her.  I didn’t have a bit good time; but that’s nothing.  She hided my hat—­Lina did; but if I’d gone home, straight home, and not gone to her house, then she couldn’t have hided it.

“I was naughty; I was real naughty; I was as naughty as King Herod and King Pharaoh.  Nobody’ll ever love me.  I’m a poor orphanless child!  I’ve got a father’n mother, but it’s just the same as if I didn’t, for they won’t let me call ’em by it.  O, they didn’t die, but they won’t be any father’n mother to ME!

“‘What strange little girl is this?’ that’s what my papa said. ’_ Looks_ like my daughter Alice!’ O, I wish I could die!”

“Come, come,” said Lina; “let’s go home.  Mother said you and I might have some macaroni cakes and lager beer, if we wouldn’t let the rest of ’em see us at it.”

“I don’t care anything about your locker beer, Lina Rosenberg, nor your whiskey and tobacco pipes, either.  Nor neither, nor nothing,” added the desolate child, standing “stock still,” with the back of her head against a pile of bricks, her eyes closed, and her hands folded across her bosom.