“Oh, Phyllis, to think they can’t all know what a noble girl you are to risk your life, when you knew it, to get Lovey out for me,” Roxanne said, after we had locked things up and got Lovelace to promise never to go near that window again and were sitting on the little back porch of the cottage trembling with fear and being very happy together.

“I don’t care what they think about me, Roxanne, just so you will be my friend sometimes in private when the others are not around,” I said, in a voice that wanted to tremble, but I wouldn’t let it.

“Do you think I would do a thing like that, Phyllis—­be a girl’s friend in private?” Roxanne asked, and her head went up into a stiff-necked pose like that portrait of her great-grandmother Byrd that looks so haughtily out of place hanging over the fireplace in the living hall in the little old cottage, in spite of the room full of old mahogany furniture and silver candlesticks brought from Byrd Mansion to keep her company.  “I’m going to be your friend all the time, and it is none of the others’ business.  I have always wanted to be, but you were so stiff with me; and Belle said she felt that you had so many friends out in the world, where you have traveled, that you wouldn’t want us.”

If I had answered what I wanted to about Belle Kirby, I should have been very much ashamed by this time.  Like a flash it came over me that it would be a poor way to begin being friends with Roxanne to make her see what a freak one of her best friends was, so I held the explosion back.

“She was mistaken, Roxanne,” I said; and I couldn’t help being a little sad as I spoke the truth out to her, for I am fifteen years old, and fifteen are a good many years to live lonely.  “I haven’t any friends in all the world.  We have traveled everywhere trying to get mother well, but I’ve had no chance to make friends.  This is the first time a girl ever talked to me in my life, and I never did talk to a boy—­and I never want to.”

“Oh, Phyllis, how dreadful!” said Roxanne; and she gave me such a hug around the neck that it hurt awfully, only I liked it.  It did feel funny to have somebody sniffing tears of sympathy against your cheek, and I didn’t know exactly what to do.  Petting has to be learned by degrees and you can’t come to it suddenly.  But I was happy.

And I’m happier to-night than I ever was in my life, only still scared quite a little, too.  I wonder how the boys and girls are going to like Roxanne’s being friends with me.  How can they hate me if I haven’t ever done anything to them?  It makes me nervous to think about it, and that combined with the secret and the accident that didn’t happen to Lovelace Peyton make my writing so shaky that I may never be able to read it.