Dorothy stopped in her hair-fixing. “Tavia,” she said, emphatically, “I have friends enough here,” and she glanced at the school-girl picture-lined wall, “and I am not afraid of Jean Faval.”
Dorothy was always pretty, sometimes splendid, and again tragic—Tavia decided she was one in all at that moment.
“Good!” declared her champion. “Don’t worry, Dorothy, but if you could just tell me——”
Dorothy stopped and looked into the glass without seeing anything.
She was worried, but since she had tried to run a lunch room, and had discovered how hard some girls, as young as herself, had to work, the thought that some day she too, might have to do something to earn money, did not seem so appalling. Should she tell Tavia?
“I am waiting, Doro,” Tavia said. “Now confess.”
“It’s really nothing so very serious, dear,” she replied, “but you know father is getting old and—he has put all his money into the Marsall Investment Company, of New York. Just before I left home father heard—that the money may be—lost!”
“All your money?”
“Yes, isn’t that dreadful? Of course, if it is lost we could never live with Aunt Winnie. We would be too proud, although she and the boys have always been so lovely to us. Yet to have no home makes it different.”
“But, Dorothy, I can’t believe that will happen. Your father has always been so wise,” and Tavia smoothed the ribbon on Dorothy’s light hair. “If it should happen——”