"O," exclaimed Dorothy shrinkingly, "it's so embarrassing to tell a person you're sorry."
"You don't have to tell her in words," insisted Helen. "You can make her realize that you understand what she is going through and that you'd like to help her."
"How can you do it without talking?" asked Ethel Brown, the practical.
"When I was younger," answered Helen thoughtfully, "I used to be rather afraid of a person who was in trouble. I thought she might think I was intruding if I spoke of it. But Mother told me one day that a person who was suffering didn't want to be treated as if she were in disgrace and not to be spoken to, and I've always tried to remember it. Now, when I know about it or guess it I make a point of being just as nice as I know how to her. Sometimes we don't talk about the trouble at all; sometimes it comes out naturally after a while. But even if the subject isn't mentioned she knows that there is at least one person who is interested in her and her affairs."
"I begin to see why you're so popular at school," remarked Margaret, who had known for a long time other reasons for Helen's popularity.
Helen threw a leaf at her friend and asked the Ethels to make some lemonade. They had brought the juice in a bottle and chilled water in a thermos bottle, so that the preparation was not hard. There were cold cheese straws to eat with it. The Ethels had made them in their small kitchen at home by rubbing two tablespoonfuls of butter into four tablespoonfuls of flour, adding two tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, seasoning with a pinch of cayenne, another of salt and another of mace, rolling out to a thickness of a quarter of an inch, cutting into strips about four inches long and half an inch wide and baking in a hot oven.
"'Which I wish to remark and my language is plain,'" Helen quoted, "that in spite of Dicky's picking all the blossoms we have so many flowers now that we ought to do—give them away.
"Ethel Blue and I have been taking some regularly every week to the old ladies at the Home," returned Ethel Brown.
"I was wondering if there were enough to send some to the hospital at Glen Point," suggested Margaret. "The Glen Point people are pretty good about sending flowers, but the hospital is an old story with them and sometimes they don't remember when they might."
"I should think we might send some there and some to the Orphanage," said Dorothy, from whose large garden the greater part of the supply would have to come. "Have the orphans any gardens to work in?"