.

"Mamma, mamma, I say!"

Her mother never even looked at her, but turned her gaze to the blackened
trees, the heaps of ruin along the pavement.

"O; papa! O, stop, papa! It's me! It's Dotty!"

Mr. Parlin bent on his runaway daughter a glance of indifference, and
called out, in passing,--

"What strange little girl is this, who seems to know us so well? It
_looks_ like my daughter Alice. If it is, she needn't come to my house
to-day; she may go and finish her visit at Mrs. Rosenberg's."

Then the horse trotted on,--indeed, he had never paused a moment,--and
carried both those dear, dear people out of sight.

What did they mean? What had happened to Dotty Dimple, that her own
father and mother did not know her?

She looked down at the skirt of her dress, at her gaiters, at her little
bare hands, to make sure no wicked fairy had changed her. Not that she
suspected any such thing. She understood but too well what her father
and mother meant. They knew her, but had not chosen to recognize her,
because they were displeased.

Dotty's little heart, the swelling of which had net gone down at all
during the night, now ached terribly. She covered her face with her
hands, and groaned aloud.

"Don't," said Mandoline, touched with pity. "They no business to
treat you so."

"O, Lina, don't you talk! You don't know anything about it. You never had
such a father'n mother's they are! And now they won't let me come into
the house!"

This wail of despair would have melted Mrs. Parlin if she could have
heard it. It was only because she thought it necessary to be severe that
she had consented to do as her husband advised, and turn coldly away
from her dear little daughter. Dotty was a loving child, in spite of her
disobedience, and this treatment was almost more than she could bear. She
found no consolation in talking with Lina, for she knew Lina could not
understand her feelings.

"She hasn't any Susy and Prudy at her house, nor no _anything_" thought
Dotty. "If I lived with Mrs. Rosenberg and that dog, I'd want to be
locked out; I'd ask if I couldn't. But, O, my darling mamma! I've been
naughty too many times! When I'd been naughty fifty, sixty, five hundred
times, then she forgave me; but now she can't forgive me any more; it
isn't possible."

Dotty staggered against a girl who was drawing a baby-carriage, but
recovered herself.

"It isn't possible to forgive me any more. She told me not to go on the
water, and I we