Dorothy lay silent for a minute or two, and again her eyes sought the soft glow from the lamp. Then making a desperate effort, she made her plunge. “Daddy,” she whispered, catching at his hand and resting her cheek upon it, “Daddy, I have got a trouble—a real, hefty-sized trouble.”
“I know you have,” he answered gravely, and then he sat silent, waiting for her to speak.
How hard it was! Why did he not help her? She held his hand tighter still. Oh! if only she could make him understand how it hurt her to speak of that old story to him! And yet it had to be done! She could not in honour take the Bursary, knowing herself disqualified for it.
“Had you not better out with it, and get it over, Dorothy?” he asked quietly.
She gasped, and suddenly burst out with a jerk, “Daddy, Mrs. Wilson told me you had been sent to prison for a fortnight when you were a young man, and the rules of enrolment for the Lamb Bursary candidates state specially that girls cannot compete whose parents have been in prison.”
It was out now—out with a vengeance—and Dorothy hid her face so that she might not have to see the pain she had caused. So strained was she that it seemed a long, long time before her father spoke, and when he did, his voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“Mrs. Wilson made a little mistake; it was not I who went to prison, but my cousin Arthur,” he was saying. “It was Arthur who was driving home from the dance that night, and I was sitting beside him trying to hold him back from his mad progress. You would have spared yourself a lot of suffering, Dorothy, if you had come to me with that old story when you were home last vacation.”
“Then you have never been in prison?” cried Dorothy, her voice rising in a shout of sheer joyfulness. “And I can have the Mutton Bone!”
“You have to win it first,” Dr. Sedgewick reminded her.
In consequence of the trouble at the bathing place, and the tired and chilled condition of the Sixth, the examination for finals was put off until next morning at eight o’clock.
Dr. Sedgewick had said that Dorothy would certainly not be fit to sit for it; but when the Sixth went into early breakfast at seven o’clock Dorothy joined them. She was a bit shaky still, and she looked rather white, but there was such radiant happiness in her eyes that she seemed fairly transfigured by it.
