been seriously punished, but those few times stood
out very clearly just now. Once she had been compelled to receive
ten sharp strokes from a ruler on her outstretched hand. At another
time she had been shut up in a dark closet, and again she had been
tied in a chair for some hours. Any of these was bad enough. The
first was soonest over, but was the most humiliating, the second was
terrifying and nerve racking, while the third tediously long and
hard to bear. For some time the child sat tremblingly listening for
her grandmother's footsteps, but evidently Mrs. Otway did not intend
to use undue haste in the matter. After a while the whistle of the
evening train announced that those who had gone up to the city for
a day's shopping were now returning, and not long after Miss
Dorothy's door opened and Marian could hear the teacher singing
softly to herself in the next room.

A new humiliation filled the child's breast. They would tell Miss
Dorothy, and she would think of her little friend as some one
desperately wicked, too wicked, no doubt, to associate with Patty.
The tears stood in Marian's eyes at this possibility. It was very,
very wrong, of course, to go off without asking leave, and it was
worse to spoil her clothes. She well knew her grandmother's views
upon this subject, and that of all things she disapproved of
wastefulness. She would say that the clothes might have done good to
the poor; they might have been sent in a missionary box to some
needy child, and it was wicked and selfish to deprive the poor of
something that could be of use.

Oh, yes, Marian knew very well all about the probable lecture in
store for her.

She sat dolefully, with clasped hands and tearful eyes. But
presently a happier thought came to her. She would tell Miss
Dorothy before her grandmother had a chance to do so, and
perhaps Miss Dorothy would understand that she had not meant
to do wrong in the first place, and that what came after was
carelessness and not wilful wickedness. She had been ordered
not to leave her room, and this she need not do to carry out
her plan. So she softly crossed the floor and timidly knocked
at the door between Miss Dorothy's room and her own. It was
opened in a moment by her friend, who viewed the forlorn
little figure first with a smile, and then with anxious
interest. "Why, my dearie," she exclaimed, "what is the
matter? Come into my room and tell me what is wrong."

"I can't come in," said Marian in a