* * * * *

Somewhere back on your pages, Louise, I wrote that I was going to be thankful for the happiness and friends that I had, no matter what happened, and I am.  It has happened.  I am the lonely little child that got a peep through the high, barred gate into the garden where other children were playing in the sunshine, and then was put out into the dark street again.  I ought not to say that, though, when I have got Mr. Douglass Byrd for a star in my darkness, as he has made himself by the way he has treated me.

I am glad I stopped by on my way to school this morning to see Roxanne and Lovelace Peyton while I was their light-hearted companion still:  now I am a woman of sorrows and disgrace.  Also, I am glad, if the blow had to be dealt me, it was Belle who did it, and not Mamie Sue nor one of the two Willises, nor anybody else.  I have always had a strange feeling about that bracelet with the red set, anyway, and I am not surprised that she struck me with it.

“Miss Forsythe,” she said, as she held it out to me all wrapped up in tissue paper and tied with a blood red string, “I will have to return your present to you, with thanks.  I cannot keep a bracelet given me by a girl whose father would go like a chicken thief and rob a neighbor’s shed of a valuable thing like an invention.  Please excuse me!”

For a minute I stood struck dumb, and watched Belle’s pink gingham skirt switch as she walked through the door of the school-room.  They had all the lunch spread on the flat rock, and I thought were waiting for me while I put my desk in order just after the bell rang.  And even while I watched Belle I was conscious of Mamie Sue’s fat expression of distress as she paused with a biscuit spread with jam half-way to her mouth.  The Willis girls looked struck even dumber than usual, and as if they didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t give them a chance to decide on anything.  I picked up my hat from the ground and walked out the gate with my head as high, as if my honor had not been laid low.

I was walking just as fast as I could past the cottage, hoping that nobody would see me before I got here to my room to realize my agony myself, when Roxanne ran out of the door to catch me at the gate.

“Oh, Phyllis, don’t look like that,” she exclaimed as she drew me through the gate and behind the big lilac bush that is full of purple blooms.  “It doesn’t make one bit of difference to me, and I love you just the same.  Who told you?”

“Belle,” I answered, trying to keep my face and voice steady.  “Who found it out, Roxanne?”