"My dear, my dear, what is it? Who is it that has been troubling you? There, there!" taking her in his arms, "have your cry out, then tell father all about it."
Hope was to the full as honest and truthful as Dolly, and her story was as exact; but she did not, for she could not, do full justice to Dolly, from the fact that she had not caught the faintest idea of that good impulse that she herself had nipped in the bud; and without this impulse Dolly's share in the story looked pretty black, and John Benham, as he listened to it, did not laugh, as Mr. Dering had done. It was not amusing to him to hear how his sweet little daughter had been hurt by all that impertinent questioning. He saw better than Hope that the impertinence was not malice, and that the ignorance it proceeded from was that old ignorance that comes from the selfishness that is born of long-continued prosperity. In trying to convey something of this to Hope, and to show her that she must not let her mind get poisoned by dwelling too much upon the matter, he said,—
"Try to put it out of your mind by thinking of something else."
Hope lifted her head, and a faint smile irradiated her face.
"I'll push it out with the good little fiddle," she answered.
"That's my brave little woman!"
That very night Hope carried her resolve into action by going over to see Mr. Kolb to arrange for the purchase of the violin. She had told him at the first, of the shop where she had seen the instrument that had taken her fancy, and of her flower-selling plan to buy it.
"Yes, yes; it was a very good shop," he had told her, and the plan was a very good plan, and some day he would go with her to look at the little fiddle.
He was quite astonished, however, when, on Saturday night, she ran in to tell him that her plan had succeeded so well that she wanted him to go with her on Monday afternoon to buy the little fiddle.
"What! you haf all the money?" he asked incredulously.