would detect the secret alliance, and Mary Beck was very hard to
console when she was once roused into displeasure. Somehow Betty liked
the idea of belonging to a club that Mary Beck did not know about. She
was a little ashamed of this feeling, but there it was! The Grants and
Lizzie refused to have Becky join, at any rate just now; and so Betty
said no more. Perhaps it would be just as well at first, and she would
be as careful as possible to gain good marks for her friend's sake as
well as her own. Then the four members of the S. B. C. came back
together into the village, and if the black cherry-tree heard their
secret it never told. Whom should they meet as they turned the corner
into the main street but Mary Beck herself, and Betty for one moment
felt guilty of great disloyalty.

"We have been to walk a little way; I met the girls as I was going to
the post-office, and we just went down the old road and sat under the
cherry-tree," she hastened to explain, but Becky was in a most friendly
mood and joined them with no suspicion of having been left out of any
pleasure. Betty felt a secret joy in belonging to the club while Becky
did not, and yet she was sorry all the time for Becky, who had a great
pride in being at the front when anything important was going on. Becky
liked to keep Betty Leicester to herself, and indeed the two girls were
growing more and more fond of each other, though a touch of jealousy in
one and a spirit of independence and freedom in the other sometimes blew
clouds over their sunny spring sky. Mary Beck had a way of seeing how
people treated her and rating them accordingly--a silly
self-compassionate way of saying that one was good to her, and a surly
suspicion of another who did not pay her an expected attention, and
these traits offended Betty Leicester, who was not given to putting
either herself or other people under a microscope. There was nothing
morbid about Betty and no sentimentality in her way of looking at
herself. Becky's sensitiveness and prejudice were sometimes very
tiresome, but they made nobody half so miserable as they did Becky
herself; the talk she had always heard at home was very narrowing; a
good deal of fruitless talk about small neighborhood affairs went on
continually and had nothing to do with the real interests of life. It
was a house where there was very little to show for the time that was
spent. Mary Beck and her mother let many chances for their own
usefulness and