Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/334

308 own eyes. I did not know that till the next day. Then Mabel explained that she had not told Maudie anything; she had just let her see for herself.

At breakfast, when none of the Sisters was near, Mabel asked Adeline quite carelessly if she had worked the night before. Adeline was rolling her eyes and pressing her head and looking exhausted the way she always did in the morning. She said at once that she had not "slept a wink" the night before, as she was "engaged on an important piece of work." And then, for the first time, she said to us all what she had told Maudie Joyce so often.

"I shall not inhabit this frail body long," she sighed, "so I must use every moment day and night." Maudie Joyce looked at her when she said this, and I saw the look. I knew right off that either Mabel Blossom had told or Maudie had discovered for herself the shameful, blighting truth.

That evening Maudie Joyce came to my room and kissed me the minute I opened the door. Then she cried and said she had treated me shamefully, and asked if I hated her; and I said I didn't—that I loved her next to mamma and papa and Grace and Georgie and Jack and Mabel Blossom. It didn't seem to cheer her very much, though, but she went on to tell me something that made me gasp and sit down in a hurry, I can tell you. She said that after breakfast she had gone right to Adeline Thurston's room and asked her why she deceived us so, and Adeline cried and confessed that she had made up the whole thing because she wanted to be popular!

Then Maudie Joyce rose in her just and queenly wrath and paced the floor with swift footsteps as she told me what happened next. "I told her she could either confess to the girls and let us forget and begin all over," Maudie said, "or that I would tell them myself, and she would be left in Outer Darkness the rest of the year. So she said she would confess. She is doing it now. I didn't want to listen to it all again, and somehow I knew you wouldn't have gone to hear it, either. You're a trump, May Iverson."

Oh, how my heart swelled as I listened to those last sweet words! And right then I made another discovery. Of course one loves one's parents and sister and brother and little nephew and Mabel Blossom, but there is something different about the love you feel for a girl like Maudie Joyce. It's so vast, so intense, so all-absorbing! But I didn't tell Maudie so. I just kissed her and said it was all right and she was a dear thing. Alas! how insufficient are mere words to convey the deepest emotions of the human heart!

It is strange, but the very minute that matter was settled I began to feel queer—broody and intense and absent-minded, and full of strange, sad thoughts about life. Sister Irmingarde looked worried last night and asked if I wasn't under some nervous strain, but it wasn't that. It's another story coming!