“Oh, Alice!”

“I did truly, and you’ll go on as good as you’ve begun, and end by liking and loving Cordelia because you pity her, I dare say.  But though I’m going to behave myself, and bear with her, I shall never come up to that, for she is so queer and so clumsy, and she does dress so!  I’m going to behave myself, though, I am,—­I am; but I hope she won’t expect too much, that she won’t push forward too fast now.”

“Oh, Alice, I don’t believe Cordelia’s that kind of a girl at all; she’s too proud.  I think she’s awkward and queer, and don’t know about dress and things, because she’s lived ’way out there on the plains, but she’ll improve when she finds we mean to be friendly to her; you see if she doesn’t.”

And Eva was right.  By the end of the term Cordelia had improved so much in the friendlier atmosphere that surrounded her that she was quite like another girl.  No longer uneasy and suspicious, she lost her self-consciousness, and with it a good deal of her awkwardness and apparent ill temper, and began to blossom out happily and cheerily as a girl should.  Even her face brightened and bloomed in this atmosphere, and by and by she took Eva and Alice and Janey into her confidence so far that she shyly asked their advice about her dress, and profited by it to such an extent that Alice could no longer say, “She does dress so!”

ESTHER BODN.

CHAPTER I.

“Oh, Laura, I want you to come home with me to-morrow after school and dine, and stay the evening.  We shall be alone together, for mamma and papa are going out to a dinner-party.  You’ll come, won’t you?  Mamma told me to ask you.”

“If it was any other evening.”

“Now, Laura, you are not going to say you can’t come!”

“I must, Kitty.  I have promised to take tea with Esther Bodn.”

“Esther Bodn!”

“Yes, she asked me to fix a day this week when I could come, and I fixed Thursday,—­to-morrow.”

“But, Laura, can’t you postpone it?  Tell her how it is,—­that mamma and papa are going away, and that Mary and Agnes are in New York, and I shall be all alone unless you come.  Can’t you do that, Laura?”

“I don’t want to do that, Kitty.”

“Oh, you’d rather go to that little Bodn girl’s than to come to me!”

“I didn’t say that, and I didn’t mean that, Kitty.  I meant that I didn’t want to do what you asked, because it wouldn’t be polite or kind.”

“Well, it seems to me, Laura Brooks, that you are putting on very ceremonious airs all at once.  Didn’t you postpone until another day a visit to Amy Stanton last winter, for just such a reason as this,—­that you might go to Annie Grainger’s when her mother went to Baltimore,—­and Amy never thought of its being impolite or unkind.”

“But that was different, Kitty.”