“Truly, truly, will you be sorry when I am dead? I hardly thought anybody would be that but father and mother, and the children,” Mollie said, while the lips quivered and the great tears rolled down her cheeks as she continued: “We are alone now, for the last time it may be, and I want to say to you what has been in my heart to say, and what I must say before I die. When I was up in that dreary back room in New York, so sick, and forlorn, and poor, and you came to me, bright, and gay, and beautiful, I did not like it at all, and for a time I felt hard toward you and angry at Theodore, who, I knew, must see the difference between me,—faded, and plain, and sickly, and old before my time, and you, the woman he loved first,—fresh, and young, and full of life, and health, and beauty. How you did seem to fill the dingy room with brightness and beauty, and what a contrast you were to me; and Theodore saw it, too, when he came in and found you there. But if there was a regret in his heart,—a sigh for what ought to have been, he never let it appear, but after you were gone, and only the delicate perfume of your garments lingered in the room, he came and sat by me and held my thin, hard hands, so unlike your soft white ones, and tried by his manner to make me believe he was _not_ sorry, and when I could stand it no longer, and said to him: ‘I am not much like her, Theo, am I?’ he guessed what was in my mind, and answered me so cheerily, ‘No, Mollie, not a bit like her. And how can you be, when your lives have been so different; hers all sunshine, and yours full of care, and toil, and pain. But you have borne it bravely, Mollie; better, I think, than Bee would have done.’ He called you Bee to me for the first time, and there was something in his voice, as he spoke the name, which told me how dear you had been to him once, if, indeed, you were not then. But he was so good, and kind, and tender toward me that I felt the jealousy giving way, though there was a little hardness left toward you, and that night after Theo was sleeping beside me I prayed and prayed that God would take it away, and He did, and I came at last to know you as you are, the dearest, noblest, most unselfish woman the world ever saw.” “No, no, you must not say that. I am not good or unselfish; you don’t know me,” Bee cried, thinking remorsefully of the times when she had ridiculed the brown alpaca dress and the woman who wore it, and how often she had tired of her society, in which she really found no pleasure, such as she might have found elsewhere. But she could not wound her by telling her this. She could only protest that she was not all Mrs. Morton believed her to be. But Mollie would not listen.