"Poor little woman!" said Tom Leighton. "Try to feel you have one friend in it. I have two sisters, and it was lonely for me when I left home. Good-by; we shall meet to-morrow." They shook hands, feeling like old friends; and Nixie sat up to shake hands too, though the dignity of his farewell was much damaged by a surreptitious lick of his quick red tongue on Bab's chin.
Tom departed, whistling, to give Nixie the walk the accident had postponed; he found himself seeing, all down the street, a tilted little nose adorned with court-plaster, and brown eyes, wistful like Nixie's. "She's plucky and simple and frank; just the girl to be a fellow's good chum," he thought. "What luck they're coming to the Blackboard!"—Tom's name for his residence.
Bab finished her tasks, and went home with glowing accounts of the little dog who had undone her and the jolly boy who had patched her up.
"There are two nice things in our new home," she said; "and I believe we'll be happy, in spite of fate."
CHAPTER IV
MAKING THE BEST OF IT
"I DON'T know where to put another thing," said Mrs. Wyndham, pushing aside a hat-box to sit beside it on the rocker, and casting a despairing glance from the shallow closet, already full, to the floor, covered with the heterogeneous contents of two trunks, in the midst of which Barbara was sitting.