"You don't know," echoed Maude. "How funny. You are just as funny as ever, Ruby Harper. I never heard of any one starting out to go to boarding-school without knowing where they were going."
"Well, I did n't need to know, or I should have asked," said Ruby, with some dignity. "I came with my Aunt Emma, and she is a teacher in this school that I am going to, and so I did not have to know anything about it. She brought me with her."
"Oh," said Maude, in more respectful tones.
To have an aunt who taught in a boarding-school was a great thing in Maude's eyes, and it made her less inclined to patronize Ruby.
"I do hope it is the same school," she went on presently, really glad in the bottom of her selfish little heart to see some one whom she had known before, for this was her first time too of leaving home. "We will have such nice times together, and I have ever and ever so many things to show you. You just ought to see all the dresses I have brought with me."
"And so have I," Ruby answered. "My trunk is just full of them, and I had a dressmaker sewing them for a whole week before I came away from home."
"Did you?" asked Maude, and Ruby was pleased to notice that she spoke as if this fact made her have a higher opinion of Ruby. "I thought your mamma always made your dresses."
"She always used to, but she is sick now," said Ruby, and the lump rose in her throat again at the thought that she was miles away from her mother. "So we had Miss Abigail Hart come and stay a whole week and sew on them all the time."
"You must have a nice lot then," said Maude. "I am glad, for if we are going to be friends, I should not like to have the other girls think that you looked old-fashioned and as if you came from the country;" and foolish little Maude tossed her head, and looked complacently down upon her pretty travelling-dress.
Perhaps if Ruby had not been thinking about her mother just then, she would have been very angry at Maude's words, and the two children would have begun to quarrel at once; but thinking of her promise to her mother, the very last thing, that she would really try to be good, and do just what she knew was right, Ruby controlled the hasty words, and said pleasantly,—