"From the very first, when I saw you coming down the corridor that afternoon I arrived, as the kind of girl I'd like,—a girl who wouldn't be mean and meddlesome; and I knew you were a lady of the real stuff, and you are—a long shot ahead of most of 'em here; and oh, I say—" Dorothea had now conquered her tears,—"aren't you the girl I saw last year at Papanti's with the Edlicotts?"
"No."
"Well, you look so like her I thought you might be, or some relation of hers maybe. You're just of her stamp, any way. Anna Fleming is always talking about those Knickerbocker Van der Bergs as if they were ahead of everybody else, and she is always quoting Kate Van der Berg as being so swell in her looks and her manners. Looks and manners! I told Anna the last time she said this to me, that you were a great sight more swell. And you are. Oh, I know who's who; there can't anybody tell me! Manners! I don't call it very good manners to talk at people as Kate Van der Berg has talked at me, with all that stuff of what her brother Schuyler says about girls. She never liked me from the start, and she did what she could to set you, and, for that matter, the rest of the girls against me. I soon caught on to that. If it hadn't been for her—"
"Oh, Dorothea! Dorothea!" burst in Hope at this point, "I can't let you go on any more like this,—it would be mean and cowardly and dishonorable in me. You're all wrong, all wrong! Kate hasn't set me or any one else against you. You don't know, you don't remember—you think I—I would have been more—more sociable—more friendly, if it hadn't been for Kate, but—but it is—it is Kate who would have been more sociable, more friendly perhaps, if it hadn't been for me! You have forgotten me—you have forgotten that we have ever met before, but we have, and I have never forgotten, for you—you hurt me horribly—horribly at that time. I remember everything about it—every word; and when I met you in the corridor, the day you arrived here in the autumn, I knew you at once, but I saw that you had forgotten me, and I—"
"But when—where—how long ago was it—that time we met first—and what in the world did I say to hurt you so?" interrupted Dorothea with wide-open eyes of amazement.
"It was at Brookside, years ago."
"At Brookside? I never knew a girl like you at Brookside."
"Not like me now. I was only ten years old then, and I—was selling mayflowers in the Brookside station."
"Oh, I remember! I remember!" cried Dorothea, leaping down from the bed where she was sitting. "And you—you are that girl?"
"Yes, my father was an engineer on that road, and couldn't afford to buy me what I wanted more than anything in the world—a violin, and I thought I would have to give it up—to go without it, until one day on the street I heard a boy with a basket of mayflowers crying 'Ten cents a bunch,' and then I saw how I might earn the money that I wanted so much, and buy my violin myself."