bert, "I would not be so very hard on the
poor child. I've been watching her, and I think, though no doubt she has
done very wrong, it was in a childish sort of way, and that you won't
find there's been any real love-making or nonsense of that sort."

"I'm sure, now I find the child could deceive us so, and act such a
part, there's nothing I could not believe," said poor Aunt Rose.

"That is sad enough, but I think you'll find it the worst, and that she
was led into it by others."

"That Florence Cray!" exclaimed Rose; "and what to do about her? How
hinder her from spoiling our child, when she's bound apprentice to me? I
wish I'd never listened to her father!"

Here came Amy herself, sent up to say that the trap was ready, and her
aunt must not be late for the train. She felt as if the last protection
was gone when she saw her aunt and cousin driven away in the conveyance
they had hired at Ellerby.

Girls bred up like Florence Cray would have thought it all a great fuss
about nothing. First and last Florence had seen nothing but fun in Amy's
cheating her strait-laced aunts and getting a little diversion, while
they wanted to shut her up with a cross child; but Amy had been bred up
to a very different way of looking at things, and the whole afternoon
had only been setting more fully before her how she had fallen from what
she had imagined of herself last Lent!

After all, the delay had made it better for her. Aunt Rose did not tell
the story quite so hotly and violently as it would have come out in the
first shock of wrath, but it was dreadful enough to hear her father
say--

"Amy, child, what is this? I never thought you would go for to do such a
thing."

"You that we had trusted from a baby," added Aunt Rose.

Aunt Charlotte said nothing, but her looks were the worst of all to
bear, they were so gentle and so sorrowful. And when Amy had sobbed out
her story they told her that she had been so sly that they did not know
how to believe her word.

"Oh, father! you may believe me. I never told a story--no, I never did!"

"And yet you could make as if you were going day by day to sit with that
poor little chap, only that you might be tramping about the lanes with
that there scamp!"

It was what he took as the hypocrisy of the thing that chiefly wounded
Mr. Lee, and when Amy declared she had always gone into the cottage and
spoken to the boy, she was told, "Much she could have attended to him,
since she had nev