"Oh, Jessie, Jessie! don't you know me? I am Dorothy—your poor little friend Dorothy whom you used to love so dearly in the old days."
Still she dared not; no, she dared not betray her identity. And with one lingering glance she turned and slowly left the library, holding, tightly clutched in her hand, one of the volumes from the great book-case.
She had caught up the first one which she laid her hand on.
"You have been gone some time, Mrs. Brown," said Mrs. Garner, fretfully, as she entered the boudoir. "Let me see your selection. What book have you brought me? Why, as I live, it is the dictionary!" she exclaimed, in a most astonished voice. "Did you think I had need of that?"
The old lady flushed painfully. It was well known that it was one of her weak points to guard carefully from the world that she had no education whatever.
She would rather have died than to have let people know that she had at one time been a poor working-woman; and now this stranger, who had been only a hours beneath her roof, had discovered it.
She did not know what remark to make to Mrs. Brown, she was so aghast when the dictionary was handed her.
Chapter XXIX.
"You have made a very wise selection, Mrs. Brown," she said. "I quite agree with you that there is no book more instructive than the dictionary. You may read me twenty pages, or such a matter. I deem it very instructive, indeed—to you."
With a gasp, Dorothy took the book. Oh, how tedious it was, pronouncing word after word, and giving their definitions!