rprised that she struck me with it.

"Miss Forsythe," she said, as she held it out to me all wrapped up in
tissue paper and tied with a blood red string, "I will have to return
your present to you, with thanks. I cannot keep a bracelet given me by
a girl whose father would go like a chicken thief and rob a neighbor's
shed of a valuable thing like an invention. Please excuse me!"

For a minute I stood struck dumb, and watched Belle's pink gingham
skirt switch as she walked through the door of the school-room. They
had all the lunch spread on the flat rock, and I thought were waiting
for me while I put my desk in order just after the bell rang. And even
while I watched Belle I was conscious of Mamie Sue's fat expression of
distress as she paused with a biscuit spread with jam half-way to her
mouth. The Willis girls looked struck even dumber than usual, and as
if they didn't know what to do. I didn't give them a chance to decide
on anything. I picked up my hat from the ground and walked out the
gate with my head as high, as if my honor had not been laid low.

I was walking just as fast as I could past the cottage, hoping that
nobody would see me before I got here to my room to realize my agony
myself, when Roxanne ran out of the door to catch me at the gate.

"Oh, Phyllis, don't look like that," she exclaimed as she drew me
through the gate and behind the big lilac bush that is full of purple
blooms. "It doesn't make one bit of difference to me, and I love you
just the same. Who told you?"

"Belle," I answered, trying to keep my face and voice steady. "Who
found it out, Roxanne?"

"Oh, Tony scouted it all out, though he didn't mean to. It was that
awful smelly bottle Lovey gave your father. Tony smelled it talking to
Mr. Forsythe at the gate and then again in the shed. He couldn't
connect them at first; but after a while he remembered, and then he
began to suspect something awful--he oughtn't to have done it, but he
did. He followed your father and Mr. Rogers out to the furnaces one
night and--saw Mr. Rogers explain it to your father. Then Mr. Forsythe
went away the next morning and Douglass began to watch Mr. Rogers, and
just three days after that he found him out at the furnace at night
with a workman getting some of the ovens ready to try the experiments.
He couldn't do a thing, and had to let them take his discovery and do
as they wanted to. Oh, truly Phyllis, it doesn't make a bit of
difference in our love for y