As regarded Mary, she would doubtless have preferred the companionship of Patience, though she loved Beatrice far the best; but she had no choice.

When she went to the parsonage Beatrice came there also, and when Patience came to the doctor's house Beatrice either accompanied or followed her.

Mary could hardly have rejected their society, even had she felt it wise to do so.

She would in such case have been all alone, and her severance from the Greshamsbury house and household, from the big family in which she had for so many years been almost at home, would have made such solitude almost unendurable.
And then these two girls both knew--not her secret: she had no secret--but the little history of her ill-treatment.

They knew that though she had been blameless in this matter, yet she had been the one to bear the punishment; and, as girls and bosom friends, they could not but sympathise with her, and endow her with heroic attributes; make her, in fact, as we are doing, their little heroine for the nonce.