“Thank you, Biddy. Now, Miss Scrimp, I am going away for a few days, and shall lock up my room, for I leave my trunk, books, and everything except my little hand-satchel there.”
“Sakes alive! where be you a-goin’?”
“To visit a sick relative, and I shall return as soon as I can.”
“Sakes alive!”
Those were the last words Hattie heard as she turned and hurried to her room.
Half an hour later she came down dressed in a traveling suit of heavy brown pongee, with a bonnet and shawl literally worth more than the entire wardrobe of Miss Scrimp, her dress and her bearing that of a lady.
“Sakes alives! Who’d have thought she had such clothes here,” was Miss Scrimp’s exclamation, as her “cheapest boarder,” as she had called her more than once, left the door.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
HATTIE’S SEX DEFENDED.
I don’t know why it is that the girls always read those “Personals” in the paper. But I know they do.
The very minute Mr. W—— entered his father’s, where he lived with his parents and sisters, his tallest and prettiest sister, Flotie, came running to him with the paper in her hand.