I am hating very
hard. I shall be thinking Indian thoughts about them while I lie in
bed."

"I hope the cross thoughts will leave you if you lie in bed, where you
can be alone, and try to drive them out. I will send your dinner to the
dormitory," said the white mother.

"I cannot eat one bite for many days. I wish to starve," Cordelia
Running Bird said, as she turned away.

CHAPTER III.

The girls had finished working in the dormitories and had gone below.
Cordelia Running Bird was relieved that she would not have to meet them
and endure such looks as they might give, though not allowed to speak to
her.

Going to her corner in the south dormitory, she put on her nightgown and
crept into bed. She hid her head beneath the blankets to shut out the
sounds below, in which she was to have no part for several hours.

But though Cordelia Running Bird was in solitude, her sharp ears caught
the noise of romping children in the playroom, and the frequent dropping
of the sliding-doors upon the narrow individual cupboards, indicating an
excessive rummaging of shelves. Cordelia knew full well the prying
habits of the Indian children.

"I am glad I have the red dress in my trunk, but they will meddle with
my other things and look at Susie's blue dress, and then roll it up in
such bad wrinkles," she said to herself. "Just like they will drop a
skein of feather-stitching silk and tramp it with their feet till it is
very dirty. Then some girl will pick it up to sew her doll clothes, and
there will not be enough for Susie's dress."

Cordelia Running Bird held her breath as these thoughts came to her.

"But I do not know if I can feather-stitch it now, for there is no one
to teach me, that I know of. Just like Hannah Straight Tree and the
dormitory girls will tell the whole school to hate me, and they will.
If I cannot get a large girl to help make the red dress, and I try to do
it all alone, it will fit so bad, and I cannot get it done in time.
What if I should tell my mother to have Susie stay at camp, and not once
come inside the yard Christmas time? Then she would not need the
dresses, and they could not call them issue goods, and not choose Susie
in the games, and shut their eyes at her."

Cordelia lay very still, but the thought of Susie's missing the
festivities by staying in the big building in the mission pasture, where
the Indian visitors camped in winter, was put from her in short order.

"Susie shall