"How dare you!" she cried, stamping her foot in a furious rage. "How dare you come in here spying on me and making fun of my things and looking at my picture! You sha'n't look at my little Dot when she is so miserable. You sha'n't put eyes on her again!"
With a white angry face she dashed past them, tore the picture from the wall, and with it held tightly against her threw herself face downward on the cot.
"We were not spying on you," began Lloyd, indignantly. "We were not making fun of your things!"
"I know better. Get out of this room, both of you! This minute!" cried Molly, lifting her white face in which her angry eyes burned like flames. Then she buried her head in her pillow, sobbing bitterly: "If y-you were an or-orphan—and hadn't but one thing in the world, you wouldn't want p-people to come sp-spying on you, that way."
Puzzled and almost frightened at such an outburst, the girls retreated to the doorway, and then as she continued to storm at them they went back to Betty's room. They could hear her sobbing even with the door shut. Presently Betty said: "I'm going in there again, and see if I can find out what's the matter. I am an orphan, too, and maybe I can coax her to tell me, when she knows how sorry I am for her."
People wondered sometimes at Betty's way of walking into their hearts; but sympathy is an open sesame to nearly all gates, and sympathy was Betty's unfailing key. It was always ready in her loving little hand.
Presently, when Molly's wild burst of angry sobbing had subsided somewhat, Betty ventured back to her. Lloyd heard a low murmuring of voices, first Betty's and then Molly's, as one little orphan poured out her story to the other. It was nearly an hour before Betty came back to her room. Lloyd had written another letter while she waited, and now sat leaning against the window-sill, listening to the monotonous drip-drop-drip-drop from a leaky spout above the window.
"Well, what was it?" she asked, eagerly, as Betty opened the door.
"Oh, you never heard anything so pitiful," exclaimed Betty, sitting down on her bed and drawing her feet up under her comfortably before she began. "It is just like a story in a book.
"Molly says that when she was little her father was a railroad conductor, and she and her mother and grandmother and baby sister lived in a little house at the edge of town. It was near enough the railroad track for them to wave to her father, from the front door, whenever his train passed. He could come home only once a week. She and Dot thought he was the best father anybody ever had, for he never came home without something in his pockets for them, and he rode them around on his shoulders and played with them all the time he was in the house. He was always bringing things to their mother, too, a pretty cup and saucer or a pot of flowers, or something to wear; and as for the old grandmother, she spent her time telling the neighbours how good her son was to her.