avorless stuff loaded with
vegetables, and bread sour with long keeping. This was terrible to
Bessie. She sipped and put down her spoon, then tried again. Miss
Foster, at the same table, partook of a rough decoction of coffee with
milk, and a little rancid butter on the sour bread toasted.

After breakfast the two girls were told that they were permitted to go
into the garden. They spent the whole morning there, and there Mr.
Carnegie and Harry Musgrave found Bessie when they came to take their
final leave of her. It was good and brave of the little girl not to
distress them with complaints, for she was awfully hungry, and likely to
be so until her dainty appetite was broken in to French school-fare. Her
few tears did not signify.

Harry Musgrave said the garden was not so pretty as it appeared from the
street, and the doctor made rueful allusions to convents and prisons,
and was not half satisfied to leave his dear little Bessie there. The
morning sun had gone off the grass. The walls were immensely lofty--the
tallest trees did not overtop them. There was a weedy, weak fountain, a
damp grotto, and two shrines with white images of the Blessed Mary
crowned with gilt stars.

Miss Foster came into the garden the moment the visitors appeared,
holding one hand against the flannel that enveloped her face. She made
the usual polite speeches of hope, expectation, and promise concerning
the new-comer, and stayed about until the gentlemen went. Then an
inexpressible flatness fell upon Bessie, and she would probably have
wept in earnest, but for the sight of Janey Fricker standing aloof and
gazing at her wistfully for an invitation to draw near. Somebody to
succor was quite in Bessie's way; helpless, timid things felt safe under
covert of her wing. It gave her a vocation at once to have this weak,
ailing little girl seeking to her for protection, and she called her to
come. How gladly Janey came!

"What were you thinking of just now when I lost my friends?" Bessie
asked her.

"Oh, of lots of things: I can't tell you of what. Is that your brother?"

"No, he is a cousin."

"Are you very fond of him? I wonder what it feels like to have many
people to love? I have no one but father."

"Harry Musgrave and I have known each other all our lives. And now you
and I are going to be friends."

"If you don't find somebody you like better, as Elise Finckel did. There
is the bell; it means dinner in ten minutes." Bessie was looking s