Part 14 (2/2)

Life seemed very dull and dreary to all the household, except, perhaps, to Mrs. Pike and Dr. Trenire. The latter was too busy just then to realize the changes going on in his home; while Mrs. Pike was fully occupied with all that lay at her hand to do.

Anna's presence did not add at all to the liveliness of the house.

She was shy and nervous. Of Dan she was, or pretended to be, quite afraid, and if she happened to have blossomed into talk during his absence, she would stop the moment he appeared--a habit which annoyed him extremely. To Betty, who was to have been her special companion, she showed no desire to attach herself, but to Kitty she clung in a most embarra.s.sing fas.h.i.+on, monopolizing her in a way that Kitty found most irksome, and made Betty furious, for hitherto Kitty had been Betty's whenever Betty needed her. Now she was rarely to be found without Anna.

But Kitty, along with the others, never felt that she could trust Anna; and they could not throw off the feeling that they had a spy in their midst.

And, worst of all, the beautiful summer days glided away unappreciated, and there were many bitter groans over what might have been had they been alone. They thought longingly of the excursions and picnics, the drives, and the free happy days in the open that they might have had.

”I do think it is so silly,” cried Betty, ”to have one's meals always at the same time, sitting around a table in a room in a house, when one can enjoy them _ever_ so much more if they come at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of places.”

”Oh, but it wouldn't be right to have them like that often,” said Anna primly. ”You would have indigestion if you didn't have your meals at regular hours.” Anna was always full of ideas as to what was right and good for her health.

”I didn't know I had an indigestion,” said Betty shortly, with a toss of her head, ”and you wouldn't either, Anna, if you didn't think so much about it.” Which was truer than Betty imagined. ”I think it is a pity you talk so much about such things.”

In September Dan went off to school. He was very homesick and not at all happy when the last day came--a fact which consoled Kitty somewhat for all the pleasure and excitement he had shown up to that point.

”If it hadn't been for Aunt Pike and Anna I believe he would have been frightfully sorry all the time,” she told herself, ”instead of seeming as though he was quite glad to go.”

”You'll--you'll write to a fellow pretty often, won't you, Kit?” he asked, coming into her room for about the fiftieth time, and wandering about it irresolutely. He spoke in an off-hand manner, and made a show of looking over her bookshelves whilst he was speaking. But Kitty understood, and in her heart she vowed that nothing should prevent her writing, neither health, nor work, nor other interests. Dan wanted her letters, and Dan should have them.

But it was after he was gone that the blow of his departure was felt most, and then the blank seemed almost too great to be borne. It was so great that the girls were really almost glad when their own school opened, that they might have an entirely new life in place of the old one so changed.

”Though I would rather go right away, ever so far, to a boarding school,” declared Betty, ”where everything and everybody would be quite, quite different.” But Kitty could not agree to this. It was quite bad enough for her as it was; to leave Gorlay would be more than she could bear.

”Hillside,” the school to which they were being sent--the only one of its kind in Gorlay, in fact--was about ten minutes' walk from Dr.

Trenire's house. It was quite a small school, consisting of about a dozen pupils only, several of whom were boarders; and Miss Richards (the head of it), Miss Melinda (her sister), and a French governess instructed the twelve.

”It is not, in the strict sense of the word, a school,” Miss Richards always remarked to the parents of new pupils. ”We want it to be 'a home from home' for our pupils, and I think I may say it is that.”

”If our homes were in the least bit like it we should never want any holidays,” one girl remarked; but we know that it is almost a point of honour with some girls never to admit--until they have left it--that school is anything but a place of exile and unhappiness,--though when they have left it they talk of it as all that was delightful.

Amongst the boarders, and loudest in their complaints of all they had to endure, were Lettice and Maude Kitson, who had been placed there by their step-mother for a year to ”finish” their education before they ”came out.” It was a pity, for they were too old for the school, and it would have been better for themselves and every one had they been sent amongst older girls and stricter teachers, where they would not have been the leading pupils and young ladies of social importance.

They laughed and scoffed at the usual simple tastes and amus.e.m.e.nts of schoolgirls, and, one being seventeen and the other eighteen, they considered themselves women, who, had it not been for their unkind stepmother, would have been out in society now instead of at school grinding away at lessons and studies quite beneath them. Their talk and their ideas were worldly and foolish too, and as they lacked the sense and the good taste which might have checked them, they were anything but improving to any girls they came in contact with.

Kitty had never liked either of the Kitson girls; they had nothing in common, and everything Lettice and Maude did jarred on her. They seemed to her silly and vulgar, and they did little petty, mean things, and laughed and sneered at people in a way that hurt Kitty's feelings.

Yet now, so great was her nervous dread of the school and all the strangers she would have to meet, she felt quite pleased that there would be at least those two familiar faces amongst them. ”And that will show how much I dread it,” she said miserably to Betty the night before.

”Think of my being glad to see the Kitsons!”

”Oh well,” said Betty cheerfully, ”they will be some one to speak to, and they will tell us the ways of the school, so that we shan't look silly standing about not knowing what to do. They won't let the others treat us as they treat new girls sometimes either, and that will be a good thing,” which was Betty's chief dread in going to the school.

Anna expressed no opinion on the matter at all. She was more than usually nervous and fidgety in her manner, but she said nothing; and whether she greatly dreaded the ordeal, or was quite calmly indifferent about it, no one could tell.

But the feelings of the three as they walked to the school that first morning were curiously alike, yet unlike. All three were very nervous.

Kitty felt a longing, such as she could hardly resist, to rush away to Wenmere Woods and never be heard of again. Betty was so determined that no one should guess the state of tremor she was in, lest they should take advantage of it and tease her, that she quite overdid her air of calm indifference, and appeared almost rudely contemptuous. Anna, though outwardly by far the most nervous of the three, had her plans ready and her mind made up. She was not going to be put upon, and she was not going to let any one get the better of her; at the same time she was going to be popular; though how she was going to manage it all she could not decide until she saw her fellow-pupils and had gathered something of what they were like. In the meantime nothing escaped her sharp eyes or ears. All that Kitty or Betty could tell her about the school, or Miss Richards, or the girls, especially the Kitsons, she drank in and stored up in her memory, and they would have been astonished beyond measure could they have known how much her hasty wandering glances told her, resting, as they did, apparently on nothing.

Before the first morning was over she knew that Helen Rawson was admired but feared; that Joyce Pea.r.s.e was the most popular girl in the school, and had taken a dislike to herself, but liked Kitty and Betty; that Netta Anderson was Miss Richards's favourite pupil, and that she herself did not like Netta; and that Lettice Kitson was not very wise and not very honourable, and that Maude was the same, but was the more clever of the two.

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