Brenda, Her School and Her Club

by Helen Leah Reed

Strangely enough, however, after the first fifty votes had been cast, with a great scattering as to the most popular youth, the two girls found it hard to get more names. The evening, indeed, was half over before the list had increased to sixty votes.

About this time an awkward thing happened. Running upstairs from the dining-room, Belle had dropped the neat little book in which she kept record of her votes, and when one of the maids handed it to Mrs. Blair, great was her surprise to find on the fly-leaf the sentence "voting contest for the picture."

"Whose handwriting is this?" she asked Edith, "and what does this all mean; surely none of you is carrying on a raffle."

"It's Belle's writing," answered Edith a little reluctantly, for she saw that her mother was angry. "But I do not know what it means."

Well after this, of course Belle was summoned to talk with Mrs. Blair, and though she reiterated that she had only desired to make as much money as she could for the Bazaar, Mrs. Blair insisted that Belle should give her all that she had already received to return to those who had subscribed or voted. Brenda, too, came in for a good share of reproof, and the whole thing was very humiliating to the two girls, who found themselves so clearly in the wrong. Beyond obliging them to conform, however, to her views of what was proper, Mrs. Blair had no intention of making them unduly uncomfortable.

"Think no more about it," she said, "only remember that you have prevented the sale of the picture, for I saw to-day that Madame Du Launy was very anxious to buy it."

After hearing this Brenda and Belle, although mortified, decided to make the best of the rest of the evening. They merely explained to some of the voters who asked them, that it had been decided to give up this plan for disposing of the picture, and that the money would be returned.

The episode of Madame Du Launy in the afternoon, and this little unpleasant incident of the evening were the only things to make this Bazaar seem very different from other Bazaars.

You know what they are all like, and that each fair or sale or Bazaar depends for its charm on the unity with which the workers carry things on, and the extent to which their friends patronize it, and I will say for "The Four" that they were much more in harmony through this whole affair than often they had been in the past, and that their friends—especially their young friends—did even more than had been expected of them to help swell the fund for the Rosas.

Brenda had been anxious to have one or two of this interesting family on the spot to work on the sympathies of the patrons of the Bazaar. She had thought that it would be delightful to have Angelina wait on the refreshment table, and she did not see why Manuel might not have been present all the time. "In some kind of fancy costume, of course, for I know that his own clothes would not be exactly clean and whole."