the Byronic atom of
humanity she had attracted to her.

However that might be, the two girls, the big fair one and the little
dark one, were, outside class-hours, seldom apart. Evelyn did not
often, as in the case of the birdlike Lolo, give her young tyrant cause
for offence; if she sometimes sought another's company, it was done in
a roguish spirit--from a feminine desire to tease. Perhaps, too, she
was at heart not averse to Laura's tantrums, or to testing her own
power in quelling them. On the whole, though, she was very careful of
her little friend's sensitive spots. She did not repeat the experiment
of taking Laura out with her; as her stay at school drew to a close she
went out less frequently herself; for the reason that, no matter how
late it was on her getting back, she would find Laura obstinately
sitting up in bed, wide-awake. And it went against the grain in her to
keep the pale-faced girl from sleep.

On such occasions, while she undid her pretty muslin dress, unpinned
the flowers she was never without, and loosened her gold-brown hair,
which she had put up for the evening: while she undressed, Evelyn had
to submit to a rigorous cross-examination. Laura demanded to know where
she had been, what she had done, whom she had spoken to; and woe to her
if she tried to shirk a question. Laura was not only jealous, she was
extraordinarily suspicious; and the elder girl had need of all her
laughing kindness to steer her way through the shallows of distrust.
For a great doubt of Evelyn's sincerity had implanted itself in Laura's
mind: she could not forget the incident of the "mostly fools"; and,
after an evening of this kind, she never felt quite sure that Evelyn
was not deceiving her afresh out of sheer goodness of heart, of
course--by assuring her that she had had a "horrid time", been bored to
death, and would have much preferred to stay with her; when the truth
was that, in the company of some moustached idiot or other, she had
enjoyed herself to the top of her bent.

On the night Laura learned that her friend had again met the loathly
"Jim", there was a great to-do. In vain Evelyn laughed, reasoned,
expostulated. Laura was inconsolable.

"Look here, Poppet," said Evelyn at last, and was so much in earnest
that she laid her hairbrush down, and took Laura by both her bony
little shoulders. "Look here, you surely don't expect me to be an old
maid, do you?--ME?" The pronoun signified all she might not say: it