“O Cousin Mate! it’s your purse. Bennie Cargill, he found it this morning right where you were upset. Don’t you know you asked Sunday who that boy was up in the gallery, and—”
“Stop a minute, Bell.” Miss Marvin opened her portemonnaie. “It’s all right; the boy hasn’t gone, has he? Run quick and give him this,” taking out a bill, “and ask him to come and see me some day, so I can thank him myself.”
Bell hurried down again, out of doors, into the street.
“Oh, no indeed!” said Bennie, coming back to meet her, and touching his cap politely. “I couldn’t; my mother wouldn’t like me to take anything for doing what I ought.”
“But my cousin sent it to you, and wants you to come and see her some day.”
“I should like to do that ever so much; but not this, please. It would look as if I did it for pay.”
“Well, what if you did?” said Bell, whose finer impulses, I am sorry to own, had been deadened by vanity and selfishness.
“I would rather do it because it’s right and honest,” said the boy simply, at the same time putting both hands behind him as if afraid the longing awakened by the new, crisp bank-note might prove too strong a temptation. “I think she will understand,” and he walked briskly away again.
“I think she’s made a mistake in the bill. Ten dollars,—what an idea! And to think he refused it,” soliloquized Bell, looking even more longingly than Bennie had done at the bank-note. “What a lot of things it would buy! If it was only mine,—and I don’t just see why I needn’t. She’s given it away; of course it can’t make any difference to her who has it now,” and upon that Bell tied the bill into one corner of her pocket-handkerchief, and stuffed the handkerchief into the deepest corner of her pocket.
“Had he gone far? Did you have to run? Why, how red your face is,” said Cousin Mate when Bell reappeared. “Sit down now and tell me all about Bennie. Was he glad of the money? Somehow I fancied from the boy’s face that——but of course all boys like money. Will he be likely to spend it all for nuts and candy? Because in that case I shall wish I had made the amount less.”