"It is very hard lines on me. I cannot help it if—if we've been poor—I'm sure I've hated being so—and I ought not to mind anything Agnes may have told the girls about me, I ought to be above minding, I think you would be, Ann, but— but—" and Violet broke down, with quivering lips and eyes swimming in tears.
"Oh, don't cry, don't cry," said Ann, in much distress; "you have your friends at Helmsford College who believe in you—the Garret girls, for instance. It was Clara who told me what Agnes Hosking had been saying; she trusts you entirely, indeed she does, and Cicely, too."
"Clara trusts me?" Violet exclaimed, looking puzzled, "I don't understand. I don't suppose Agnes has said anything that is not true."
"Oh, Violet, you don't mean that, you can't!" cried Ann, in a shocked voice.
Violet wiped the tears from her eyes, and regarded her agitated companion with increasing bewilderment. During the last few weeks she had been conscious of a change in Ann's manner to her. It was not that Ann had been less kind than she had been before; indeed, if anything, she had been kinder; but she had certainly showed herself less inclined to be confidential, and often Violet had caught her watching her with a dubious, puzzled expression on her face.
"It isn't possible you could have done such a thing," Ann proceeded, "there's some mistake. Tell me, what is it you think Agnes Hosking has hinted to the girls about you?"
"I don't think she has hinted anything," Violet returned; "no doubt she has told plain facts in the most objectionable way possible. She's said, I expect, that I'm a poor girl whom your father has taken into his home out of charity, and, therefore, that I'm beneath her in position and may be slighted and snubbed as she and her friends please. She's a horrid, mean girl, that's what she is, and I hate her! I wish I'd defied her from the first instead of—oh, Ann, you'll despise me I know, but I feel I must tell you all about it, whatever you may think afterwards!"
"Yes, do," said Ann eagerly, "I fancy we are at cross purposes somehow. As to father's having taken you into his home out of charity—if Agnes said that, why it's only her ill-bred way of putting it; she knows nothing about it, and she should mind her own business. But what is it you're going to tell me?"
Thereupon, with burning cheeks, Violet confessed that she had entered into a sort of compact with Agnes to obtain an invitation for her to No. 8 Laureston Square, in return for which she had been given a promise that Agnes would not make public her private affairs. Ann listened in silence, naturally greatly astonished, her eyes fixed gravely on her companion's crimson face.
"Do you utterly despise me?" Violet asked wistfully, when she had concluded her tale—it had been a difficult one to tell.