“You’re a nice one,” cried Katherine, “staying off like this when to-day is the eleventh.”
“Many orders?” inquired Mary.
Betty sat down on Mary’s couch, ruthlessly sweeping aside a mass of half finished valentines to make room. “Girls, this has got to stop,” she announced abruptly.
Mary dropped her scissors and Katherine shut the rhyming dictionary with a bang.
“What is the trouble?” they asked in chorus.
Then Betty told her story, suppressing only Emily’s name and mentioning all the details that had made up the point and pathos of it. “And just think!” she said at last. “She’s a girl you’d both be proud to know, and she works like that. And we stepped in and took away a chance of–of ribbons and note-books and dessert for Sunday.”
“May be not; perhaps hers were so homely they wouldn’t have sold anyway,” suggested Katherine with an attempt at jocoseness.
“Don’t, please,” said Betty wearily.
Mary came and sat down beside her on the couch. “Well, what’s to be done about it now?” she asked soberly.
“I don’t know. We can’t give them orders because she took her sign down. I thought perhaps–how much have we made?”