"However shall I get all the money to pay Alma's debt now?" she thought, dazedly. "I can't get even half of it from Mother, because she would certainly deny herself the very necessities of life to send it. I _cannot_ ask Uncle Thomas for it." She knew that in all probability she could influence Mr. Prescott, through his increasing affection for her, to help her mother out of their present difficulty, but the thought of doing so was utterly repugnant to her, and, it seemed to her, intolerably humiliating both for Mrs. Prescott and Alma. She was afraid that Mrs. Prescott, learning that Uncle Thomas had shown a favoritism for her, might urge her to this course, and she could not decide whether she should swallow her pride for her mother's sake and for Alma's, or whether she should insist that they fight their way courageously out of the difficulty. So far as she herself was concerned, there would have been no question; there was nothing that she would not endure rather than ask her uncle for a cent.
Her hands were trembling as she folded the letter up, and put it in her bureau drawer under her handkerchief case.
"How am I going to tell Alma?" Well, she would break the news to-night. First of all, she must solve the problem of the debt to Mildred, Only one course was possible. There was her father's ring, which she always kept, and which was her very dearest, possession. It was of the heaviest gold, and set with a large seal stone of lapiz-lazuli. She might raise perhaps thirty-five or forty dollars on it--which left about seventy still to be found by hook or crook. Never had any sum appeared so gigantic to Nancy. She could see no other possible means of getting it than by borrowing it temporarily from Charlotte, and paying it back by one way or another during the holidays. She knew that Charlotte would be glad to lend it to her, but she shrank from the thought of putting their friendship to such a use. However, there was no help for it. In Alma's pocketbook she found enough money to pay her way into the city. Her mother would certainly be sending them a little more in a day or two for their return home. She took the money--two or three dollars, left from the ten which Alma had borrowed from her,--and began to change into her suit, thinking, meanwhile, with a smile of incredulity, of the imprudence of sending herself and Alma to one of the very schools where their poverty would be contrasted with the abundance of Mildred Lloyds and Katherine Leonards.