The Smallest Sister sighed profoundly. “Yes. I guess I shan’t ever stop feeling so as long as I live.”
“Not even if we should make hot chocolate in a chafing-dish?”
“That would be splendid,” Dorothy admitted eagerly, “but, Betty dear, it wouldn’t make you feel the same about a person who’d pretended to be very fond of you and all the same she did a mean hateful thing, would it now?”
Betty admitted that hot chocolate might not be able to wipe out all the sting of false friendship. “But maybe the person didn’t mean to be mean,” she suggested hopefully.
Dorothy’s little face was very sober. “I’m sure she didn’t know how sad it would seem to me,” she explained. “Betty, let’s play I was mistaken, and enjoy our hot chocolate as much as ever we can.”
But when it came time to put out the light, Dorothy pleaded that it should be left burning “just a teeny, weeny speck, like a night-lamp.”
“What’s the matter, Dottie?” objected Betty. “Have you been seeing ghosts again?”
“Whatever made you think of that?” asked Dorothy anxiously. “I never said a single word about ghosts. Besides, I couldn’t see her again, because I didn’t see her before—I only heard her.”
“Well, you won’t see or hear any ghosts here,” Betty assured her, turning out the light. “When I’m around they all vanish, and real people come in their places. So you can go to sleep this minute, and sleep as sound as ever you can.”
An hour or two later Betty, who had given her bed to Dorothy, and was curled up on the box-couch, was awakened by the shrill sound of a little voice pleading piteously. It was Dorothy, fast asleep but sitting bolt upright in bed and talking in a strained, perfectly intelligible monotone.