"Excuse me, Miss Brett. Were you just going out? I'm glad I did not disturb you. Shall I hold it open for you?" She stepped to one side and waited gravely without moving a muscle till Lucine after a withering stare had stalked angrily back to her window. The corner of Berta's mouth gave a quick, queer little twitch before settling back into proper solemnity.
"Come, Laura. You'd better. I shan't keep you long." At her imperious gesture Laura slid out of the room at an apologetic angle, her head twisted for a final shy glance back at Lucine who was apparently absorbed in her papers.
When safely outside in the corridor Berta seized her about the waist and whirled her away from all possible earshot through cracks and transom.
"Now then, exit the ogre, or rather eximus nos, leaving the ogre alone. For what particular reason is she trampling all over you to-day? I didn't catch all her last speech. You don't mean to say that you have promised to help her with her writing?"
"Yes," Laura nodded her rough curly head. She was a delicate little thing with the irregular features that generally accompany such hair. Her beauty lay in her expression which brightened charmingly from minute to minute since her escape. "Oh, how good the air smells!" she stopped to lean from an open window. "Lucine shivers at every draught. It is hard to manage the ventilation to suit two persons in the same room. I smother----"
"Of course you smother--and you smother a good many more hours than she shivers. Trust her for that. Such a little ninny as you are! Don't forget that you have agreed to room with my best little sister when she enters next fall. You would not have been thrust in with Lucine Brett this year if I could have prevented it."
"Oh, but if I can't come back--you know, I'm almost sure I shan't come back. And anyhow I'm the only friend she has. I've got to stick to her. If you could hear her mourning over her loneliness! Nobody cares for her--nobody in all the world! And the girls don't like her. I promised to be her friend. She--she needs me."
"Humph!" growled Berta sourly, but somehow her arm was stealing around the slight shoulders so far beneath her own, "that's the silly kind of a person you are. If any creature needs you, from a lame kitten to a lion with a toothache, you'll cling. Idiocy, that's what it is! Your brother warned me last summer to restrict your charities. And now to help her with her writing, and she your most dangerous rival for the editorship!"