“All the other girls had boys around them all the time—­”

“You went with Walter Stubbs, didn’t you?  And you told him that maybe you’d come home with him and maybe you wouldn’t—­and that if anyone you liked better came along you were going to stay with them.  You didn’t know Will Burns was coming, did you?”

“No, but—­I thought if he did come—­”

“That’s just it.  You didn’t think about Walter at all, did you.  You wanted to have a good time yourself—­and you didn’t care what sort of a time he had!  You just thought that if Will Burns did come he was sure to want to be with you, and so, as soon as you saw him come in you sent Walter off.  Oh, you were silly, Dolly—­and it was all your own fault.  Don’t you think it’s rather mean to blame me?  We were together when Will Burns was coming toward us, and I wanted to go away and let you stay there—­but you said I must stay.  Don’t you remember that?”

Dolly, as a matter of fact, had quite forgotten it.  But she remembered well enough, now that Bessie had reminded her of it.  And, though she had a hot temper, and was fond of mischief, Dolly was not sly.  She admitted it at once.

“I do remember it now, Bessie.”

“Well, don’t you see how absurd it is to say that I took Will away from you?  We were both there together—­I couldn’t tell when we saw him coming that he was going to talk to me, could I?  And listen, Dolly—­he asked me to go home with him in his buggy, and I said I wouldn’t.”

With some girls that would have made the chance of mending things very remote.  But Dolly, although her jealousy had been so quickly aroused, was not the sort to get still angrier at this fresh proof that she had been mistaken in thinking that Will Burns had liked her better than Bessie.

“Why, Bessie—­why did you do that?”

Bessie laughed.

“We’re not going to be here very much longer, are we, Dolly?” she said.  “Well—­if we’re not going to be here, we’re not going to see much of Will Burns.  You’re not the only girl who—­was—­who thought that he ought to be paying more attention to her than to me.  There was a pretty girl from Jericho, and he’s known her a long time.  Walter told me about them.

“And I could see that she wanted him to drive her home, so I asked him why he didn’t do it.  And he got very much confused, but he went over to her, finally, and she looked just as happy as she could be when he handed her up into his buggy, and they all went off along the road together, Will and she and two or three other fellows who had driven over together from Jericho.”

Dolly’s expression had changed two or three times, very swiftly, as she listened.  Now she sighed, and her hand crept out to find Bessie’s.

“Oh, Bessie,” she said, softly, “won’t you forgive me, dear?  I’ve made a fool of myself again—­I’m always doing that, it seems to me.  And every time I promise myself or you or someone not to do it again.  But the trouble is there are so many different ways of being foolish.  I seem to find new ones all the time, and every one is so different from the others that I never know about it until it’s too late.”