It happened that John Benham had exchanged his hours of work for that day with a fellow engineer on the 5.30 train that came out from Boston. Dolly, watching the train as it came to a stop at the Brookside station, saw something that interested her greatly. It was an exchange of glances between that "ugly, impudent, hateful thing" and the engineer, as he stood in his cab.
"So that is her father, is it,—that smutty workman! She'd better set herself up and talk about her nice home!" was Dolly's inward comment out of the wrath that was raging within her.
"What is the matter with Dolly?" asked Mr. Dering, fifteen minutes later, as Dolly, red and pouting, and with a fierce little frown wrinkling her forehead, sat in unusual silence beside him on the front seat of the carriage. Matter? and Dolly, finding her tongue, poured forth the story of her grievance. With all her faults, Dolly was not deceitful or untruthful; and the story she told was remarkably exact, neither glossing over her own words, nor her humiliating defeat through Hope's cleverness of speech.
Mr. Dering seemed to find the whole story very amusing, and at the end of it laughingly remarked: "I don't think you had the best of it, Dolly."
Her mother, from the back seat, was mortified and shocked that Dolly should have been so vulgar as to quarrel on the street.
"But Dolly began it by asking such questions," spoke up Mary Dering. "Dolly is such a rattler. I'm sure that flower-girl would never have spoken to her first."
Then Mrs. Dering wanted to know what Mary knew about "that flower-girl," and Mary described Hope as she had seen her.
"She said her father was an engineer on this road, did she?" asked Mr. Dering, turning to Dolly.
"Yes, papa."
"It must be John Benham. He is one of the best engineers on this road,"—Mr. Dering was one of the Directors of the road,—"yes, it must be Benham. I should think he might have just such a child as that."