now that my little daughter is open and honest as the
day! I repeat, write at once, a full report, to your loving father, LEVIS
RAYMOND."

"Oh," cried Lulu, speaking aloud in the excitement of feeling, "I do wish
papa wouldn't make me confess everything to him! I think it's dreadfully
hard! And what's the use when it hurts him so to hear it?

"And I'm sure it hurts me to tell it. I'll have to, though, and I won't
keep anything back, though I'm terribly afraid he'll write that I must be
sent away to some boarding-school, so that Grandpa Dinsmore won't be
bothered with me any more. Oh dear! if papa could only come home, I'd
rather take the hardest whipping he could give me, for though that's
dreadful while it lasts, it's soon over. But he can't come now; they
wouldn't think of letting him come home again so soon; so he can't punish
me in that way; and I wouldn't take it from anybody else," she added,
with hotly flushing cheeks and flashing eyes; "and I don't believe he'd
let anybody else do it."

She turned to his letter and gave it a second reading.

"How kind and loving papa is!" she said to herself, penitent tears
springing to her eyes, "It's plain he hasn't been told a word about my
badness--by Grandpa Dinsmore or Mamma Vi, or anybody else. That was good
in them.

"But now I must tell it all myself; he says for me to do it at once, and
I won't go on disobeying him by waiting; besides, I may as well have it
over."

Her writing-desk stood on a table near at hand, and opening it, she set
to work without delay.

She began with a truthful report of her efforts to escape becoming one of
Signor Foresti's pupils and its failure; giving verbatim the
conversations on the subject in which she had taken part; then described
with equal faithfulness all that had passed between the signor and
herself on the day of their collision, and all that followed in the
school-room and at Viamede.

She told of the fortnight in which all her time at home had to be spent
in the confinement of her own room, then of the long weeks passed as a
boarding-scholar at Oakdale Academy, describing her bedroom there, the
sort of meals served in the dining-room, the rules that she found so
irksome, and the treatment received at the hands of teachers and
fellow-boarders; repeating as she went along every conversation that she
felt belonged to the confession required of her.

But the long story was not all told in that one day; it took several; for