know something about my father and mother, Dolly. You've
no idea how much that worries me. Sometimes I feel as if I never would
find out anything."

"Oh, you mustn't get discouraged, Bessie. Try to be as cheerful as you
are when it's someone else who is in trouble. You're the best little
cheerer-up I know when I feel blue."

"Oh, Dolly, I do try to be cheerful, but it's such a long time since
they left me with the Hoovers!"

"Well, there must be some perfectly good reason for it all, Bessie, I
feel perfectly sure of that. They would never have gone off that way
unless they had to."

"Oh, it isn't that that bothers me. It's feeling that unless something
dreadful had happened to them, I'd have heard of them long ago. And
then, Maw Hoover and Jake Hoover were always picking at me about them.
When I did something Maw Hoover didn't like, she'd say she didn't
wonder, that she couldn't expect me to be any good, being the child of
parents who'd gone off and left me on her hands that way."

"That's all right for her to talk that way, but she didn't have you on
her hands. She made you work like a slave, and never paid you for it at
all. You certainly earned whatever they spent for keeping you, Miss
Eleanor says so, and I'll take her word any time against Maw Hoover or
anyone else."

"I've sometimes thought it was pretty mean for me to run off the way I
did, Dolly. If it hadn't been for Zara, I don't believe I'd have done
it."

"It's a good thing for Zara that you did. Poor Zara! They'd taken her
father to jail, and she was going to have to stay with Farmer Weeks.
She'd never have been able to get along without you, you know."

"Well, that's one thing that makes me feel that perhaps it was right
for me to go, Dolly. That, and the way Miss Eleanor spoke of it. She
seemed to think it was the right thing for me to do, and she knows
better than I do, I'm sure."

"Certainly she does. And look here, Bessie! It's all coming out right,
sometime, I know. I'm just sure of that! You'll find out all about your
father and mother, and you'll see that there was some good reason for
their not turning up before."

"Oh, Dolly dear, I'm sure of that now! And it's just that that makes me
feel so bad, sometimes. If something dreadful hadn't happened to them,
they would have come for me long ago. At least they would have kept on
sending the money for my board."

"How do you know they didn't, Bessie? Didn't Maw Hoover get most of the
let