n continued desperately, "how do you suppose
I can go to a fancy boarding school under these circumstances?"

"Why-----"

For once Elizabeth was momentarily silenced. Suddenly her face
brightened. "I tell you!" she exclaimed. "I'll speak to my father about
it. He can fix it so that you will be able to go to the Hall with me, I
know."

"I'd like to see myself an object of charity!" Nan cried, with heat.
"I, guess, not! What I can't earn, or my father can't give me, I'll go
without, Bess. That's all there is to that!"

Bess stared at her with quivering lips. "You can't be so mean, Nan," she
faltered.

"I'm not mean!" denied the other.

"I'd like to know what you call it? Why, father'd never miss your
tuition money in the world. And I know he'd pay your way if I asked him
and told him how bad I felt about your not going."

"You're a dear, Bess!" declared Nan, impulsively hugging her friend
again. "But you mustn't ask him, honey. It wouldn't be right, and I
couldn't accept.

"Don't you understand, honey, that I have some pride in the matter?
So have Papa Sherwood and Momsey. What they can't do for me their own
selves I wouldn't want anybody to do."

"Why, that sounds awfully silly to me, Nan!" said Bess. "Why not take
all you can get in this world? I'm sure I should."

"You don't know what you are saying," Nan returned seriously. "And,
then, you are not poor, so you can afford to say it, and even do it."

"Poor! I'm getting to hate that word," cried Bess stormily. "It never
bothered me before, much. We're not poor and none of our friends were
poor. Not until those old mills closed. And now it seems all I hear is
about folks being POOR. I hate it!"

"I guess," said Nan ruefully, "you don't hate it half as much as those
of us who have to suffer it."

"I'm just going to find some way of getting you to Lakeview Hall, my
dear," Bess rejoined gloomily. "Why! I won't want to go myself if you
don't go, Nan."

Her friend thought she would better not tell Bess just then that the
prospect was that she, with her father and mother, would have to leave
Tillbury long before the autumn. Mr. Sherwood was trying to obtain
a situation in Chicago, in a machine shop. He had no hope of getting
another foreman's position.

Nothing had been heard from Mr. Adair MacKenzie, of Memphis. Mrs.
Sherwood wanted to write again; but her husband begged her not to. He
had a proper pride. It looked to him as though his wife's cousin did no