"So I supposed, and therefore I want to know what it was. Now let us sit down on the stops and have it all out. What did she say?"
Amy began to feel a little ashamed of herself, by this time, and to see that she had been hasty to believe evil of her friend. She began at the beginning and told Eva all that Dora had said about her.
"I thought she had had a hand in it," said Eva, when the story was finished. "She came to me in the first place and wanted to tell me something that I was never to tell—something somebody had said about me; but I told her that I always told mother everything, and that I never wanted to hear what people said about me, so she subsided. The truth of the matter is this. Dora was teasing me one day to give her my amber necklace, which I would not do."
"'You would give it to Amy Preston in a minute, if she asked you,' said she; 'you think more of that shop-girl than you do of me, though I am your cousin.'"
"'Well,' said I, half laughing, 'you see, Dora, Amy is a cheaper friend than you are. She never wants anything and you want everything.'"
"So much for that! As for the dress story, there is a little foundation for that, too. Dora asked me a few days ago if that was my old dress you were wearing."
"'Of course,' said I. 'Amy wears all my dresses and I wear hers. That is the way we show our regard for each other.'"
"'But don't you really give her dresses?' she asked."
"All the girls laughed, for every one knows how proud you are about receiving presents, Amy."
"And I said, to carry on the joke, 'To be sure I do! I buy all her clothes and books, and my father pays her school bills.'"