"I do, and I wish you would not tell her this," Winnie entreated.
"Just as you please," Adelaide replied, "but I hate mysteries."
"So do I," said Winnie, with a deep sigh.
"What is the matter with you, any way, Winnie?" Adelaide asked.
"That is my business," Winnie replied, shortly, and left the room, banging the door behind her.
"Winnie isn't half as jolly as she used to be," said Milly, in an injured tone. "I always depend on her to save me when I'm not prepared for recitation. When Professor Todd was coming down the line in the Virgil class and was only two girls away from me, I made the most beseeching faces at Winnie, who sits opposite, and usually she is so quick to take the hint, and come to the rescue by asking Professor Todd a lot of questions about the sites of the ancient cities, and where he thinks the Hesperides were situated. She gets him to talking on his pet hobbies, and he proses on like an old dear, until the bell rings for change of class. But this time she just stared at me in the most wall-eyed manner, while I signaled her in a perfect agony as he got nearer and nearer. I tried to think of some question of my own to ask him, and suddenly one popped into my head which I thought was very bright. He had just been talking about Æneas' shipwreck, and he referred to St. Paul's, with a description of the ancient vessels, and how he met the same Mediterranean storms, and I plucked up courage and said, 'Professor Todd, why is it that we hear so much about Virginia, and in all the pictures of the shipwreck we see her standing on the deck of the ship, and Paul rushing out into the surf to rescue her? Now I have read the chapter in Acts which describes St. Paul's shipwreck, very carefully, and in that, and in all the history of Paul, there is not one word about Virginia.'
"You should have heard the girls shout; I think they were just as mean as they could be. That odious Cynthia Vaughn nearly fell off the bench, and Professor Todd looked at me in such a despairing way, as though he gave me up from that time forth. I just burst into tears, and Winnie came over and took me out of the room. She acknowledged that it was all her fault, and that she ought to have come to my rescue sooner."
Poor Milly! we could only comfort her with our assurances that we loved her all the more for her troubles.
Summer was approaching, and we were making our plans for vacation. Milly's mother had invited Adelaide to spend the season with them at their cottage at Narragansett Pier; and Winnie's father had consented to her spending June and July with me on our Long Island farm. Winnie cheered up somewhat at the prospect. "It's the warm weather which makes me feel muggy," she said; "I shall feel better when we get out of the city too. The noise and racket distract me, and seeing so many miserable people makes me miserable and sick at heart."
"I don't feel so at all," I replied. "It makes me happy to see how much good even we can do. Mrs. Halsey would not have obtained her situation with Madame Céleste but for us, or have been able to place Jim with Miss Prillwitz."