The music came to a close with a loud double bang that made Lloyd start up from her chair with a guilty flush, fearing that she had been caught at her peculiar occupation.  Before Fidelia could say anything, Lloyd walked over to her with the friendliest of her practised smiles, and held out the box of chocolate creams.

“Take some,” she said.  “They are the best I’ve had since I left Kentucky.”

“Thanks,” said Fidelia, stiffly, screwing around on the piano-stool, and helping herself to just one.  But feeling the warmth of Lloyd’s cordial tone, urging her to take more, she thawed into smiling friendliness, and took several.  “They are delicious!” she exclaimed.  “You got them at the cake shop on the corner, didn’t you?  There are two awfully nice American girls stopping at this hotel who took me in there one day for some.  They’ve been in Kentucky, too.  The one named Elizabeth lives there.”

“Why, it must be Betty and Eugenia!” cried Lloyd.  “The very girls we came here to meet.  Do you know them?”

“Not very well.  We’ve only been here a few days.  But I dearly love the one you call Betty.  She came into my room one night when I had the tooth-ache, and brought a spice poultice and a hot-water bag.  Mamma was at a concert, and Fanchette was cross, and I was so miserable and lonesome I wanted to die.  But Elizabeth knew exactly what to do to stop the pain, and then she stayed and talked to me for a long time.  She told me about a house party she went to last year, where the girls all caught the measles at a gypsy camp, and she nearly went blind on account of it.”

“That was my house pahty,” exclaimed the Little Colonel, “and my mothah is Betty’s godmothah, and Betty is goin’ to live at my house all next wintah, and go to school with me.”

Fidelia swung farther around on the piano-stool, and faced Lloyd in surprise.  “And are you the Little Colonel!” she cried.  “From what Elizabeth said, I thought she was pretty near an angel!” Fidelia’s tone implied more plainly than her words that she wondered how Betty could think so.

A cutting reply was on the tip of Lloyd’s tongue, but the sight of her face in the mirror checked it.  She only said, pleasantly, “Betty is certainly the loveliest girl in the world, and—­”

“There she is now!” interrupted Fidelia, nodding toward the door as voices sounded in the hall and footsteps came out from the office.

“Oh, they’ll be so surprised!” said Lloyd, looking back with a radiant face as she ran toward the door.  “We came two whole days earlier than they expected!”

Fidelia heard the joyful greeting, the chorus of surprised exclamations as Lloyd flew first at Betty, then at Eugenia, with a hug and a kiss, then turned to greet her Cousin Carl.

“Betty will never look at me again,” Fidelia thought, with a throb of jealousy, turning away from the sight of their happy meeting, and beginning to strike soft aimless chords on the piano.  “I wish I were one of them,” she whispered, with the tears springing to her eyes.  “I hate to be always on the edge of things, and never in them.  We never stay in a place long enough at a time to make any real friends or have any good times.”