“And I’m sure it hurts me to tell it.  I’ll have to, though, and I won’t keep anything back, though I’m terribly afraid he’ll write that I must be sent away to some boarding-school, so that Grandpa Dinsmore won’t be bothered with me any more.  Oh dear! if papa could only come home, I’d rather take the hardest whipping he could give me, for though that’s dreadful while it lasts, it’s soon over.  But he can’t come now; they wouldn’t think of letting him come home again so soon; so he can’t punish me in that way; and I wouldn’t take it from anybody else,” she added, with hotly flushing cheeks and flashing eyes; “and I don’t believe he’d let anybody else do it.”

She turned to his letter and gave it a second reading.

“How kind and loving papa is!” she said to herself, penitent tears springing to her eyes, “It’s plain he hasn’t been told a word about my badness—­by Grandpa Dinsmore or Mamma Vi, or anybody else.  That was good in them.

“But now I must tell it all myself; he says for me to do it at once, and I won’t go on disobeying him by waiting; besides, I may as well have it over.”

Her writing-desk stood on a table near at hand, and opening it, she set to work without delay.

She began with a truthful report of her efforts to escape becoming one of Signor Foresti’s pupils and its failure; giving verbatim the conversations on the subject in which she had taken part; then described with equal faithfulness all that had passed between the signor and herself on the day of their collision, and all that followed in the school-room and at Viamede.

She told of the fortnight in which all her time at home had to be spent in the confinement of her own room, then of the long weeks passed as a boarding-scholar at Oakdale Academy, describing her bedroom there, the sort of meals served in the dining-room, the rules that she found so irksome, and the treatment received at the hands of teachers and fellow-boarders; repeating as she went along every conversation that she felt belonged to the confession required of her.

But the long story was not all told in that one day; it took several; for Lulu was too young and inexperienced in composition and penmanship to make very rapid work of it.

Evelyn was taken into her confidence, Capt.  Raymond’s letter read to her, then parts of the confession as it progressed from day to day, till she had heard the whole.

“Do you think I have told papa everything I ought, Eva?” Lulu asked when she had finished reading aloud the last page of her report.

“Yes; I can’t see that you’ve kept back a single thing:  I’m sure your father is right in saying that you are open and honest as the day!  And Oh, Lulu! what a nice, good father he must be!  I don’t wonder his children all love him so dearly, or that you and Max were so distressed when that bad news came.”

“No,” Lulu said, hastily brushing away a tear, “but I am sure you must wonder how I can ever be disobedient to such a dear father; and I often wonder too, and just hate myself for it.