There was a look in her father’s face, as he spoke, that told Laura very plainly that all she had said had done more harm than good, and that henceforth there would be no more “sunset teas” with Esther Bodn.  All her little plans, too, for making Esther’s life brighter, by welcoming her into her own home, and bringing her into a better acquaintance with the other girls, were rendered impossible now.  But if she could not be good to her in this way, she would be more than ever kind and cordial to her at school, and she would try to enlist Kitty Grant’s interest.  She would tell Kitty about that pretty refined home, and ask her to be kind and cordial too; and she was sure that Kitty would not refuse, for, in spite of her fun and her worldliness, Kitty had really a kind heart.  Yes, she would enlist Kitty, and Kitty was all powerful.  If she once got interested in a person, she could make everybody else interested.  But, alas, for this scheme!

CHAPTER III.

Alas! because Kitty had already taken her stand on the other side.  She had already told the girls that Esther Bodn lived on McVane Street, in near neighborhood to a lot of rum-shops and foreigners, and had then “made fun,” in the same rattling way that she had used with Laura, airing all her little suspicions and suggestions about the name of Bodn, in the half-frolic fashion that always had such effect upon the listeners.  It had such effect on this occasion, that Laura found that every girl had passed from indifference to an active prejudice against Esther.  Kitty herself had not meant to produce this result.  Indeed, Kitty had had no meaning whatever but that of amusing herself,—­“making fun;” and when the girls, relishing this “fun,” laughed and applauded, she did not realize that she had done a mischievous thing.  Poor Laura, however, realized everything as the days went by, and she saw Esther subjected to a certain critical observation.  Her only hope was that the person most interested did not notice this; but one day she came upon Esther at recess, bending over a pile of exercises, at which she was apparently hard at work.

“What’s the rush, Esther, that you’ve got to work at recess?” she asked.

Esther murmured an unintelligible reply, and bent her head still lower; and then it was that Laura, to her dismay, saw a tear drop to the exercises upon the desk.

“Esther, Esther, what is the matter?  Tell me!”

“I—­I don’t know,” faltered Esther, “but things seem different.  I always knew that the girls didn’t care very much for me, but they were not unkind.  Now—­they—­seem unkind some way.  Perhaps it’s only my fancy, but—­but they seem to look down on me as they didn’t before, and—­and sometimes they seem to avoid me, and—­I’m just the same as ever, except—­except I’m a good deal shabbier this spring.  I’ve always been rather shabby, but this spring it’s worse, because we’ve lost some money,—­not