and all through supper I was thrilled with a secret exultation. Repentant? Ashamed? Not a bit of it! I’d have done the same thing over again, and all I felt sorry for was that I hadn’t done it long ago.
When I got home that night Nancy looked at me wonderingly and said:
“You look like a girl, to-night, Miss Charlotte.”
“I feel like one,” I said laughing; and I ran to my room and did what I had never done before — wrote a second poem in the same day. I had to have some outlet for my feelings. I called it “In Summer Days of Long Ago,” and I worked Mary Gillespie’s roses and Cecil Fenwick’s eyes into it, and made it so sad and reminiscent and minor-musicky that I felt perfectly happy.
For the next two months all went well and merrily. Nobody ever said anything more to me about Cecil Fenwick, but the girls all chattered freely to me of their little love affairs, and I became a sort of general confidant for them. It just warmed up the cockles of my heart, and I began to enjoy the Sewing Circle famously. I got a lot of pretty new dresses and the dearest hat, and I went everywhere I was asked and had a good time.
But there is one thing you can be perfectly sure of. If you do wrong you are going to be punished for it sometime, somehow and somewhere. My punishment was delayed for two months, and then it de-
