“Florence Engle,” she thought.  “Who, no doubt, will cut me dead if I give her the opportunity.”

A little hurriedly she turned in at the hotel door and went to her room.  She had removed hat and gantlets, and was preparing for a bath and change of clothing when a light knock sounded on her door.  The rap, preceded by quick little steps down the hall, was essentially feminine.

“Hello, Cousin Virginia,” said Florence.  “May I come in?”

Virginia brought her in, gave her a chair and regarded her curiously.  The girl’s face was flushed and pink, her eyes were bright and quite gay and untroubled, her whole air genuinely friendly.  Last night Virginia had judged her to be about seventeen; now she looked a mere child.

“I was perfectly nasty last night, wasn’t I?” Florrie remarked as she stood her sunshade by her chair and smiled engagingly.  “Oh, I know it.  Just a horrid little cat . . . but then I’m that most of the time.  I came all this way and in all this dust and heat just to ask you to forgive me.  Will you?”

For the moment Virginia was nonplussed.  But Florence only laughed, clasped her hands somewhat affectedly and ran on, her words tumbling out in helter-skelter fashion.

“Oh, I know.  I’m spoiled and I’m selfish, and I’m mean, I suppose.  And, oh dear, I’m as jealous as anything.  But I’m ashamed of myself this time.  Whew!  You ought to have listened in on the party after you left!  If you could have heard mama scold me and papa jaw me about the way I acted it would have made you almost sorry for me.”

“But you weren’t horrid at all,” Virginia broke in at last, her heart suddenly warming to this very obviously spoiled, futile, but none the less likable, Florrie.  “You mustn’t talk that way.  And if your parents made you come. . . .”

“They didn’t,” said Florrie calmly.  “They couldn’t.  Nobody ever made me do anything; that’s what’s the matter with me.  I came because I wanted to.  As the men say, I wanted to square myself.  And, would you believe it, this is the third time I have called.  Mr. Struve kept telling me that you had gone to see old Joe Ramorez . . . isn’t he the awfullest old pirate you ever saw?  And the dirtiest?  I don’t see how you can go near a man like that, even if he is dying; honestly I don’t.  But you must do all kinds of things, being a doctor.”

Her clasped hands tightened, she put her head of fluffy hair to one side and looked at Virginia with such frank wonder in her eyes that Virginia colored under them.

“And,” ran on Florrie, forestalling a possible interruption, “I was ready to poke fun at you last night just for being something capable and . . . and splendid.  There was my jealousy again, I suppose.  You ought to have heard papa on that score; ’Look here, my fine miss; if you could just be something worth while in the world, if you could do as much good in all of your silly life as Virginia Page does every day of hers,’ . . . and so forth until he was ready to burst and mama was ready to cry, and I was ready to bite him!” She trilled off in a burst of laughter which was eloquent of the fact that Florence Engle, be her faults what they might, was not the one to hold a grudge.