Miss Parker saw Dotty’s hand, and her beautiful mouth was wreathed with smiles.
“Ah,” cried she, “that is just what I’ve been wanting to see! I have looked in vain for that little hand.”
Dotty gazed at a crack in the floor; for she could not meet her teacher’s eye.
“My dear child,” added Miss Parker, stroking Dotty’s hair, “don’t you feel a great deal happier to-night than usual? a great deal lighter-hearted? You don’t know how this makes me love you, dear.”
There it was; the praise of her teacher! Just what she had been longing for so much. But why didn’t it make her happy? Happy! She was one mass of misery from head to foot. When Miss Parker kissed her so tenderly for good by, she wanted to scream, for the kiss “burnt her mouth.”
“There,” cried Tate, as they left the school-room, “aren’t you glad you did it?”
“No, indeed,” said Dotty, turning round upon her friend in a sort of frenzy, and shooting out the words like pins and needles. “What you s’pose? I should think you’d be ’shamed, Tate Penny; so ’shamed you’d want to die! Telling me to hold my hand up, when it’s a bommernibble big black lie.”
“You needn’t to’ve done it,” returned Tate, cowering before the lightning in Dotty’s eyes.
“You’re the wickedest girl there is in this town,” went on the angry child. “Made me whisper, when I ate alum to purpose not to! Keep a-talking so I had to shake my head and make the scholars see it, and get scolded at! And then you devised me to tell a lie! I feel it coming up into my throat, Tate Penny; it chokes me so I can’t talk. It’s worse’n if I’d said it. When you do a lie, it’s a great deal worse.”