A few minutes after, as Eva and Alice were stirring their cocoa at the supper-table, the girl they had been criticising came hastily into the dining-room and took her place. She was a tall girl for her age, with a heavy ungainly figure, a swarthy skin, and black hair which was tied back in a long curl. She wore a dark plaid skirt, with a blouse of fiery red cashmere, and a hair ribbon of a deep violet shade. Nothing could have been more ill-matched or more unbecoming. The girl who sat beside her, pretty Janey Miller, was a great contrast, with her blond curls, her rosy cheeks, and simple well-fitting dress of blue serge. Her every movement, too, was as full of grace as Cordelia Burr's was exactly the reverse. Everything seemed to go well with Janey; everything seemed to go ill with Cordelia. She spilled her cocoa, she dropped her knife, she crumbled her gingerbread, and she clattered her cup and saucer. Certainly she was not a very pleasant person to sit near. But Janey tried to conceal her annoyance, and succeeded very well, until at the end of the meal Cordelia, in her headlong haste in leaving her seat, tipped over a glass of water upon her neighbor's pretty blue dress. This was too much, for Janey, and it was little wonder that she jumped up with an impatient exclamation, nor that she declared to Eva and Alice a little later that Cordelia ought to be ashamed of herself for being so careless, and that she did wish she didn't have to sit next to her.
"I suppose, though, I shall have to sit there until the end of this term; but there's one thing I'm not going to do any more,—I'm not going to dance with her. She doesn't keep step, and she does dress so!" concluded Janey.
"Yes, she does dress dreadfully; and to think it's her own fault. She chooses her things herself," said Eva.
"No!" exclaimed Janey.
"Yes, she does; her mother is 'way off somewhere, and Cordelia gets what she likes."
"And she doesn't know any better than to like such horrid things! Sometimes she looks as if she'd lived with wild Indians!"
"That's it; that's it, I forgot!" shouted Eva. "She has lived 'way off out in a Territory on an Indian reservation. Her father is an army officer of some kind."
"Young ladies, young ladies, look at your clocks!" suddenly called a voice outside the door.
"Why, goodness, it's bedtime!" whispered Janey. "Good-night, good-night."
The next afternoon, when the Sunday classes were in session in the great hall, Janey, who was not in the same class with Eva and Alice, wondered as she looked across at them what they could be talking about that seemed so interesting. This is what they were talking about: Alice, in her clever exact way, had told Miss Vincent the whole of that little Saturday-night talk concerning the good Samaritan. Miss Vincent smiled when Alice told of Eva's odd simplicity of application; but as Alice went on and presented Eva's perplexity and her plea for girls of her age,—their lack of time and all that, and her own assurance to Eva that Miss Vincent did not mean what Eva fancied that she did,—Miss Vincent, in a quick, decided, almost eager way, started forward and cried,—