Lena still choked a little and was very miserable inside her but she did everything just as the cook told her.

The girls Lena always sat with were very sorry to see her look so sad with her trouble.  Mary the Irish girl sometimes got very angry with her.  Mary was always very hot when she talked to Lena’s aunt Mathilda, who thought she was so grand, and had such stupid, stuck up daughters.  Mary wouldn’t be a fat fool like that ugly tempered Mathilda Haydon, not for anything anybody could ever give her.  How Lena could keep on going there so much when they all always acted as if she was just dirt to them, Mary never could see.  But Lena never had any sense of how she should make people stand round for her, and that was always all the trouble with her.  And poor Lena, she was so stupid to be sorry for losing that gawky fool who didn’t ever know what he wanted and just said “ja” to his mamma and his papa, like a baby, and was scared to look at a girl straight, and then sneaked away the last day like as if somebody was going to do something to him.  Disgrace, Lena talking about disgrace!  It was a disgrace for a girl to be seen with the likes of him, let alone to be married to him.  But that poor Lena, she never did know how to show herself off for what she was really.  Disgrace to have him go away and leave her.  Mary would just like to get a chance to show him.  If Lena wasn’t worth fifteen like Herman Kreder, Mary would just eat her own head all up.  It was a good riddance Lena had of that Herman Kreder and his stingy, dirty parents, and if Lena didn’t stop crying about it,—­Mary would just naturally despise her.

Poor Lena, she knew very well how Mary meant it all, this she was always saying to her.  But Lena was very miserable inside her.  She felt the disgrace it was for a decent german girl that a man should go away and leave her.  Lena knew very well that her aunt was right when she said the way Herman had acted to her was a disgrace to everyone that knew her.  Mary and Nellie and the other girls she always sat with were always very good to Lena but that did not make her trouble any better.  It was a disgrace the way Lena had been left, to any decent family, and that could never be made any different to her.

And so the slow days wore on, and Lena never saw her Aunt Mathilda.  At last on Sunday she got word by a boy to go and see her aunt Mathilda.  Lena’s heart beat quick for she was very nervous now with all this that had happened to her.  She went just as quickly as she could to see her Aunt Mathilda.

Mrs. Haydon quick, as soon as she saw Lena, began to scold her for keeping her aunt waiting so long for her, and for not coming in all the week to see her, to see if her aunt should need her, and so her aunt had to send a boy to tell her.  But it was easy, even for Lena, to see that her aunt was not really angry with her.  It wasn’t Lena’s fault, went on Mrs. Haydon, that everything was going