“O Miss Ashton! Miss Ashton!” Susan cried, rushing to her, and throwing both arms around her neck. “Do, do, do, please forgive me? It was Marion Parke’s book, and I thought no one would ever know. I’ve been so sorry. I’d have given worlds, worlds, worlds, if I had never seen it! O Miss Ashton, what shall I, shall I do?”
“Ask God to forgive you,” Miss Ashton said solemnly. “It is another and a greater judge than I that has the power to do so. If I were only sure,” but she did not finish her sentence, she only loosened Susan’s arms gently from around her neck, then said “good-by” to her, and watched her once more as she went away down the corridor.
“And Marion Parke knew it all the time, but would not tell on Susan,” she said to herself as she 249 turned back into her room. “Marion is a girl to be depended upon, I am glad she is to stay with me.”
“Kate Underwood,” she said, when Kate’s time came for the farewell counsel, taking both of the girl’s hands in hers, “I’m proud of you. You have done of late what many older and wiser persons have failed to do,—learned the lesson, which I hope has been learned for your lifetime, that there is no fun in things, however written or spoken, that hurt other’s feelings. I have seen you many times thoughtful and tender, when your face was alive with the ridiculous thing you saw or heard. Kate, I feel so much safer to let you go from me now than I should have six, even three months ago. Tell me, will you try not to forget?”
“I’ll be good as long as I live. I’ll never make fun, no, not even of myself,” burst out Kate, “though now I’m dying to get before a mirror and see how I must have looked when you thought me so thoughtful. Was it so, Miss Ashton?” and Kate made up a face which a sterner rebuker than her teacher could not have seen without a smile.
“There’s no use, Kate,” she said; “go now, only don’t forget.”
And Kate made a sweeping courtesy and disappeared.
With Mamie Smythe she had a long talk, not one word of which did either divulge. In that hour it would be safe to say Mamie learned some life-lessons which it will be hard for her to forget. 250
And so the time passed on. Recitations ceased four days before commencement, and the girls, those even who thought themselves over busy before, found every hour brought a fresh claim upon their time.
“Our bee-hive,” Miss Ashton called it, and the girls called her the “queen bee,” and made many secret plans about the various gifts they were to give her the last night of the term. The ceremony this year was to be a public one, therefore of great importance.