nd Etta should have been companions, but
he said she cried and told tales, though she told no more tales than he
did.

A large family should be such a specially happy community, but it
sometimes occurs that there is a girl or boy who is nothing but a middle
one, fitting in nowhere. So it was with Henrietta, till the youngest
child was born.

Unfortunately she had an almost morbid longing, unusual in a child, to
be loved and of importance. Now she would have given anything to have
heard Minna and Louie's secrets, not for the sake of the secrets, but as
a sign that she was thought worthy of confidence. She ran everyone's
errands continually, but she broke the head off Arthur's carnation as
she was bringing it from his bedroom to the garden, and she let out
William's secret, which he had told her in an unusual fit of affability,
in order that she might curry favour with Minna. This infuriated
William, and did not conciliate Minna. She grew fast and was a little
delicate. It made her irritable, but her brothers and sisters, who were
all growing with great regularity, could not be expected to understand
delicacy. She always said she was sorry after she had been cross, but
they, who did not have tempers, could not see that that made things any
better.

In her loneliness she made for herself, like many other forlorn
children, a phantom friend. It was a little girl two years older than
she was, for Henrietta preferred to look up, and be herself in an
inferior position. For this reason she did not much care for dolls,
where she was decidedly the superior. She called her friend Amy. Amy
slept with her, helped her with her lessons, told her secrets
perpetually, and grumbled about the other children.

One day they all had a game at Hide and Seek. The lot fell on her and
William, now fourteen, to hide. They ensconced themselves in a dark spot
in a little grove at the end of the garden. The others could not find
them, and there was plenty of time for talk. William was a kind boy and
rather a chatterbox, ready to expand to any listener, even a sister of
nine. Henrietta never knew how it was that she told him about Amy. It
had always been her firm resolve that this was to be her own dead
secret, never revealed. But the unusual warmth of the interview went to
her head. It was in a kind of intoxication of happiness that she poured
out her confidence. The shrubbery was so dark that William's face could
not be seen, but he began fidge