lub, but Becky doesn't really understand, for we've kept it very
secret indeed."

"I want to know," exclaimed Serena.

"Yes, and it's for such a good object. I'll tell you some time, perhaps,
but we want to cure ourselves of a fault." It seemed no harm to tell
good old Serena; the compact had only been that none of the other girls
should know. "We keep a little book, and we can have a good mark at
night if we haven't said anything against anybody, but to-day I shall
have such a black one! It makes us careful how we speak; truly, Serena;
but Becky doesn't know, and she's making me feel so badly just because
she suspects something."

"The tongue is an evil member," said Serena. "I don't know but doing
things is full as bad as sayin' 'em, though. I s'pose you ain't kind of
flaunted it a little speck that you had some secret amon'st you, to
spite Mary?"

"She was stuffy about it and she had no right to be," Betty said this at
first hastily, and then added: "I did wish yesterday that she would ask
to belong and find that for once she couldn't."

Serena took Betty's light hand in her own work-worn one and held it
fast. "Le's come and set on the doorstep a spell," she said; "I want to
tell you something about me an' a girl I thought everything of when we
was young.

"She was real pretty, and we went together and had our young men--not
serious, only kind o' going together; an' Cynthy an' me we had a
misunderstandin' o' one another and we didn't speak for much's a
fortnight an' said spiteful things. I was here same's I be now, an' your
Aunt Barbara, she was young too, an' the old lady, Madam Leicester, she
was alive and they all was inquirin' what had come over me. I used to
have a pretty voice then, and I wouldn't go to singin'-school or evenin'
meetin' nor nothin'. I set out to leave here an' my good kind home an'
go off to Lowell working in the mill, 't was when so many did, and girls
liked it. Cynthy lived to the minister's folks. I've never got over it
how ugly spoken I was about that poor girl, and she used to look kind of
beseechin' at me the two or three times we met, as if she'd make up if I
would, but I wouldn't. An' don't you think, one night her brother come
after her to take her home, up Great Hill way, and the horse got scared
and threw 'em out on the ice; an' when they picked Cynthy up she was
just breathin' an' that was all, an' never spoke nor knew nothin' again.
'T was at the foot o' that hill just this