Kitty received it with rapture, and used to bring it into Mrs. Clavering's drawing-room on the company evenings, and to show it with pride to her companions as Florence's gift.
"She had never had such a pretty bag in her life," she said, and she kissed Florence many times when she presented it to her.
Florence meant it as payment for the cherry-colored ribbons, but she did not mean it as payment for what she had stolen out of Kitty's desk. She knew that nothing could ever pay for that deed; but it comforted her conscience just a little to present the bag to Kitty.
The Scholarship was to be competed for on the thirtieth of October, and the girls reassembled at Cherry Court School about the fifteenth of August.
Three weeks after the school had recommenced, some time therefore in the first week in September, Mary Bateman, who had been bending for a long time over her desk with her hands pressed to her temples and her cheeks somewhat flushed, suddenly raised her eyes and encountered the fixed stare of Kitty Sharston. Kitty had done her work and was leaning back in her chair. Kitty's sweet pale face looked a little paler than usual. She was expecting a letter from her father, and on the week when the letter was to arrive she always looked a little paler and a little more anxious than she did at other times.
"Have you finished your theme?" said Mary, abruptly.
"Yes," answered Kitty.
"You write so easily," pursued Mary, in a somewhat discontented voice; "you never seem to have to think for words. Now, I am not at all good at composition."
"I am not at all good at other things," replied Kitty, in a gentle voice; "mathematics, for instance; and as to my arithmetic, it is shameful. Father wants me to be able to keep accounts very well for him. I shall do that when I go to India, but still I have no ability for that sort of thing—none whatever."
"How much you must love your father," said Mary.