ked in her quaint Quaker phrase, "Thee mustn't be too
suspicious, my dear; it maybe harmless mischief, after all." And then
Mary had replied, "I shouldn't be suspicious of any of the other girls,
mother; but Lizzy and Nelly Ryder are always doing and saying the
mischievous things that have a sting in them;" and Mrs. Marcy, spite of
her Quaker charity, then admitted that she had never quite liked the
ways of those girls, and had often been sorry that they were in the
Westboro' High School; "but, poor things," she added the moment she had
made this admission, "they are more to be pitied than the persons they
hurt, for _they_ can get over the hurt, but these poor girls can't get
over their own wrong-doing so easily. It makes a black mark on them
every time, and black marks are hard to rub off; and thee'll see if they
are up to any wrong-doing now, it will leave a mark, and so they'll get
the worst of it in the long run."

"But it's always _such_ a long run before a mark of that kind shows,"
laughed Mary. "Girls of that sort seem to succeed in making everybody
but themselves uncomfortable, and these two specially always appear to
be so gay and full of good times with their giggle and chatter."

"But the Bible says, Mary, 'for as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of the fool;' and thee can think of this the next
time thee hears the chatter, and then thee can say to thyself, 'It _may_
be nothing but foolish folly, after all.'"

"Yes, it _may_ be nothing but that," Mary allowed; but when the next
morning she heard it again, her first doubts and suspicions returned in
full force, and she said to herself, "I'm perfectly sure that there's
something more than mere foolishness in this crackling of thorns. I'm
perfectly sure there's mischief with a sting in it. I feel it in the
air, and I'm just going to watch out and see if I can't stop it as I did
that horrid St. Valentine business last winter."

And while good kind Mary was thus "watching out" for this mischief,
there, only two or three seats away from her, sat Angela Jocelyn, about
whom all the mischief was gathering as a dark cloud gathers over a fair
sky. And Angela's sky was particularly fair to her just then, for she
had been made very happy by the invitation she had received that
morning,--so happy that she had said to her elder sister, Martha
Jocelyn, "To think of Marian Selwyn's inviting _me_. Isn't it beautiful
of her?" and Martha had answered ba