you!"

Gradually, and very faintly, Bessie began to have a glimmering of what was wrong with her friend. She found it hard work not to smile, or even to laugh outright, but she resisted the temptation nobly, for she knew only too well that to Dolly, sensitive and nervous, laughter would be just the one thing needed to make it harder than ever to patch up this senseless and silly quarrel, which, so far, was only one sided.

To Bessie, who thought little of boys, and to whom jealousy was alien, the idea that Dolly was really jealous of her seemed absurd, since she knew how little cause there was for such a feeling. But, very wisely, she determined to proceed slowly, and not to do anything that could possibly give Dolly any fresh cause of offence.

"Dolly," she said, "you mustn't feel that way. Really, dear, I didn't do that at all. I talked to him when he came to sit down by me, but that was all. I couldn't very well tell him to go away, or not answer him when he spoke to me, could I?"

"Oh, I know what you're going to say—that it was all his fault. But if you hadn't tried to make him come he wouldn't have done it."

"I didn't try to make him come. Did you?"

Dolly stared at her a moment. The question seemed to force her to give attention to a new idea, to something she had not thought of before. But when she spoke her voice was still defiant.

"Suppose I did!" she said angrily. "I wanted to have a good time—and he was the nicest boy there—"

"Maybe he saw that you were waiting for him too plainly, Dolly. Maybe he wanted to pick out someone for himself—and if you'd pretended that you didn't care whether he talked to you or not he would have been more anxious to be with you."

Dolly blushed slightly at that, though it was too dark for Bessie to see the color in her cheeks. She knew very well that Bessie was right, but she wondered how Bessie knew it. That feigned indifference had brought her the attentions of more than one boy who had boasted that he was not going to pay any attention to her just because everyone else did.

But the gradually dawning suspicion that she might, after all, have only herself to blame for the spoiling of her evening's fun, and that she had acted in rather a silly fashion, didn't soften Dolly particularly. Very few people are able to recover a lost temper just because they find out, at the height of their anger, that they are themselves to blame for what made them angry, and Dolly was not yet one of them.

"I suppose you'll tell all the other girls about this," she said. She wasn't crying any more, but her voice was as hard as ever. "I think you're horrid—and I thought I was going to like you so much. I think I'll ask Miss Eleanor to let me share a room with someone else."

Bessie didn't answer, though Dolly waited while the wagon drove on for quite a hundred yards. Bessie was thinking hard. She liked Dolly; she was sure that this was only a show of Dolly's temper, which, despite the restrictions that surrounded her in her home, and had a good deal to do with her mischievous ways, had never been properly curbed.

But, though Bessie was not angry in her turn, she understood thoroughly that if she and Dolly were to continue the friendship that had begun so promisingly, this trouble between them must be settled, and settled in the proper fashion. If Dolly were allowed to sleep on her anger, it would be infinitely harder to restore their relations to a friendly basis.

"I suppose you don't care!" said Dolly, finally, when she decided that Bessie was not going to answer her.

And now Bessie decided on a change of tactics. She had tried arguing with Dolly, and it had seemed to do no good at all. It was time to see if a little ridicule would not be more useful.

"I didn't say so, Dolly," she answered, very quietly. And she smiled at her friend. "What's the use of my saying anything? I told you the truth about what happened this evening, and you didn't believe me. So there's not much use talking, is there?"

"You know I'm right, or you'd have plenty to talk about," said Dolly, unhappily. "Oh, I wish we'd never seen Will Burns!"

"I wish we hadn't seen him until to-night, Dolly," said Bessie, gravely. "You know, that trip in the automobile with Mr. Holmes the other day wasn't very nice for me, Dolly. If they had caught me, as Mr. Holmes had planned to do, I'd have been taken back to Hedgeville, and bound over to Farmer Weeks—and he's a miser, who hates me, and would have been as mean to me as he could possibly be. That's how we met Will Burns, you know—because you insisted on going with Mr. Holmes in his car to get an ice-cream soda."

"That's just what I said—you pretended to forgive me for that, and you haven't at all—you're still angry, and you humiliated me before all those people just to get even! I didn't think you were like that, Bessie—I thought you were nicer than I. But—"

"Dolly, stop talking a little, and just think it over. You say you didn't have a good time, and you mean that you didn't have a boy waiting around to do what you told him all evening. Isn't that so?"

"All the other girls had boys around them all the time—"

"You went with Walter Stubbs, didn't you? And you told him that maybe you'd come home with him and maybe you wouldn't—and that if anyone you liked better came along you were going to stay with them. You didn't know Will Burns was coming, did you?"

"No, but—I thought if he did come—"

"That's just it. You didn't think about Walter at all, did you. You wanted to have a good time yourself—and you didn't care what sort of a time he had! You just thought that if Will Burns did come he was sure to want to be with you, and so, as soon as you saw him come in you sent Walter off. Oh, you were silly, Dolly—and it was all your own fault. Don't you think it's rather mean to blame me? We were together when Will Burns was coming toward us, and I wanted to go away and let you stay there—but you said I must stay. Don't you remember that?"

Dolly, as a matter of fact, had quite forgotten it. But she remembered well enough, now that Bessie had reminded her of it. And, though she had a hot temper, and was fond of mischief, Dolly was not sly. She admitted it at once.

"I do remember it now, Bessie."

"Well, don't you see how absurd it is to say that I took Will away from you? We were both there together—I couldn't tell when we saw him coming that he was going to talk to me, could I? And listen, Dolly—he asked me to go home with him in his buggy, and I said I wouldn't."

With some girls that would have made the chance of mending things very remote. But Dolly, although her jealousy had been so quickly aroused, was not the sort to get still angrier at this fresh proof that she had been mistaken in thinking that Will Burns had liked her better than Bessie.

"Why, Bessie—why did you do that?"

Bessie laughed.

"We're not going to be here very much longer, are we, Dolly?" she said. "Well—if we're not going to be here, we're not going to see much of Will Burns. You're not the only girl who—was—who thought that he ought to be paying more attention to her than to me. There was a pretty girl from Jericho, and he's known her a long time. Walter told me about them.

"And I could see that she wanted him to drive her home, so I asked him why he didn't do it. And he got very much confused, but he went over to her, finally, and she looked just as happy as she could be when he handed her up into his buggy, and they all went off along the road together, Will and she and two or three other fellows who had driven over together from Jericho."

Dolly's expression had changed two or three times, very swiftly, as she listened. Now she sighed, and her hand crept out to find Bessie's.

"Oh, Bessie," she said, softly, "won't you forgive me, dear? I've made a fool of myself again—I'm always doing that, it seems to me. And every time I promise myself or you or someone not to do it again.