"I suppose not," she said dully, and the flush died from her face. "No one would have believed me so wicked! They don't know me as I am."
"Tell me about it, Joy, please. I know you didn't do it on purpose. You couldn't have. I never did anything to make you hate me like that."
She went over to the grate and stirring the embers into a ruddy glow drew up a chair and coaxed Joy into it.
"Now we can talk better," she said, sitting down on the hearth rug beside her. "Tell me how it happened. It's been such a mystery to me."
Joy glanced down into the face upturned in the firelight and almost gasped at its serenity. There was not a trace of anger in the eyes lifted to her own--nothing but kindness--and that look, somehow, made it harder to proceed than any torrent of words.
Between long pauses Joy told Blue Bonnet all that she had told Annabel Jackson and Miss North; and Blue Bonnet listened breathlessly, a little sigh escaping her lips as Joy finished the story.
There was tense silence for a minute, and then Blue Bonnet reached up shyly and took Joy's hand in her own.
"I suppose I ought to be awfully angry at you, Joy, for letting me suffer as I have the past few days--but--somehow--I'm not--at all. I feel so sorry for you that there isn't any room for anger. I think I can understand how it happened."
"You can! It doesn't seem possible that any one could see my side."
Blue Bonnet gazed into the fire and spoke slowly.
"Oh, yes, they could. All but the untruth, Joy--that was the worst, of course--but then--maybe you haven't been brought up on the truth as I have. The truth is a sort of religion in our family. That and 'do unto others.'"
Joy was quick to come to the defence of her family.
"No--I can't find excuse in that. My people are truthful. They're queer, maybe, but they are truthful and honest."
Perhaps it was the gentle pressure of Blue Bonnet's hand, the sympathy in her eyes, that gradually brought forth the story of Joy's life. Before she had finished, Blue Bonnet's tears mingled with Joy's, and the grasp tightened on the hand held in her own.
In that half hour Joy poured out her heart in a way she would have thought impossible an hour before. She told Blue Bonnet of her cold, indifferent father; of the patient, long-suffering mother who had planned and saved, and sacrificed to keep her in school, and of how she had longed to repay the devotion with the highest honors the school could give.