Even a very unobserving person would have been able to see at a glance that Highland Hall had begun life as a private residence. Originally a big square house built of cream colored brick and generously supplied with large windows and many balconies, it was perched in solitary grandeur at the top of a broad, grassy knoll; but when it became a school red brick additions, four stories high, extended toward the north and west. An enormous and very ugly veranda stretched along the entire length of one of these additions. From it a broad flight of twelve wide steps led to the ground.
Doctor Rhodes and his family lived in part of the old mansion. His office was there on the ground floor in a room that had once been the dining room. The original parlor, a huge oblong room with a very high ceiling, and the dark and rather dingy library back of it were still unchanged.
Most of the second, third and fourth floors of the large modern wings contained bedrooms. The school rooms, music rooms and studio occupied the ground floor. New pupils always complained that there were miles and miles of dark hallways and corridors in which to get lost.
The kitchen, dining hall and laundry were in the basement.
There were no houses visible from three sides of the school building. From the fourth side, however, one could see the dark roofs of other ancient houses falling into decay, each with its huge yard, its overgrown hedge, its unkempt shrubbery. Beyond that, nearly a mile distant, the red town of Hiltonburg glistened in the sunshine.
Somewhere between five and six o’clock that September afternoon, the station hack stopped on the curved driveway in front of Highland Hall. Mr. Black and his five charges alighted. This spectacle afforded much interest to some three dozen maidens clustered in pairs and groups on the front steps and on the wide veranda. To the embarrassed newcomers these girls seemed to be all eyes. Never had the children from Lakeville encountered so many curious eyes. There couldn’t have been more than seventy-two but it seemed more like seventy-two thousand, Bettie said afterwards.
Mr. Black addressed one of the nearest groups. “Can you direct me,” he asked, “to Doctor Rhodes?”
“Yes, Sir,” said a little girl with smooth, brown hair, rising promptly and leading the way inside. “He’s probably in the office, but if he isn’t I’ll find him for you.”
“Ah,” said Doctor Rhodes, who was in his office, rising from his chair, “the five young ladies from Lakeville, I take it?”
“Yes,” returned Mr. Black.
“Most of our flock arrived day before yesterday,” said Doctor Rhodes, shaking hands all around, “but you are still in very good season. And what is better, you are just in time for dinner. If Miss—Ah, I don’t remember your name—”
“Jane,” supplied the little girl.
“Ah, yes, Miss Jane. If you will inform Mrs. Rhodes she will show the young ladies their rooms so they can—er—wash up a little if necessary. You, Mr. Black, may come with me.”
Mrs. Rhodes appeared presently and the girls were introduced. They didn’t like Mrs. Rhodes. She was a tall, very slender, very upright old woman in an unnatural state of tidiness, with evenly-waved white hair parted exactly in the middle, a wrinkled white skin and glittering black eyes set in narrow slits. Her unsmiling mouth, too, was a narrow slit. Her expression was severe. She was really rather a frosty and blood-curdling old lady to look at but on this occasion she proved a good guide, surprisingly nimble for her years. She led them to the second floor, through a wide arch that led to a long corridor. There were doors down each side of this and a window at the end. Here she paused to consult a note book that she had taken from her pocket.
“Number twenty. Miss Vale, Miss Bedford in here. Miss Tucker, Miss Mapes in twenty-two. Miss Bennett in twenty-four with Miss Isabelle Carew.”
“Oh!” gasped Mabel, “couldn’t I stay with the others?”
“No,” returned Mrs. Rhodes. “I have arranged for you to room with Miss Carew of Kentucky. I’m quite sure you will like her.”
Half an hour later, the five girls were led to the dining room and seated at one of several long tables. Mr. Black they perceived at a distance—a tremendous distance it seemed—at Doctor Rhodes’s own table.
“There’s custard pie, tonight,” whispered the girl next to Henrietta. Not a pretty girl, but her face was alive with mischief and Henrietta liked her at once. “I saw pies and pies cooling in the basement window when I crawled under the veranda to see what they kept in there. Grand place to hide. What’s your name? Mine’s Maude Wilder and I live in Chicago. My room’s in the West Dormitory too, so you’ll see a lot of me.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Henrietta.
“The three girls over there with the fancy hair are Seniors. The other big girls at that table are Juniors. They don’t mix very much with the rest of us.”
“Won’t you have a biscuit?” asked a gentle voice at Bettie’s right. “I’m Sarah Dickinson—Sallie for short.”
Bettie looked at Sallie. She saw a slender girl of about fifteen, with dark blue, rather sad eyes, light brown hair and a pale skin. Her shoulders drooped a little and there was something rather pathetic about her smile. The blue collar of her middy blouse was very much faded. This was very noticeable because, just at the beginning of the term as it was, nearly all the garments in sight were brand new.
“Are you a new girl?” asked Bettie.
“I’m the oldest girl,” returned Sallie. “I’ve been here, vacations and all, for five years. I haven’t any home of my own.”
Later, Bettie learned more about Sallie. Her mother had died when Sallie was about nine years old. For a time she had lived alone with her father but he had decided that she would be better off in a girls’ school. An old man, her grandfather, perhaps, had brought her to Highland Hall, paying her tuition for one year in advance. Something had happened to her father. When the school year was finished it was discovered that Sallie had no home to go to, her relatives having somehow disappeared. Anne Blodgett, a last year’s girl who told Bettie about it, was not very sure of her facts. Anyway, the housekeeper had allowed her to stay because the little girl seemed likely to prove useful—there were many errands to do in a house like that.
She was still staying and still proving useful; but the kindly housekeeper had departed and stern Mrs. Rhodes had apparently taken the housekeeper’s place. Sallie was kept busier than ever. She sometimes seemed a bit dazed and bewildered and just a little bit down-hearted; but at first she had very little to say about herself.
Mr. Black departed very soon after dinner. The girls were permitted to walk to the last corner of the school premises with him. There they clung to him tearfully and begged him to make a great many business trips to Chicago in order to visit them at Highland Hall.
“I know,” sobbed Bettie, “that we’re going to be homesick. I’m homesick now. It’s so different. All those strange girls and that awful Mrs. Rhodes.”
“And me with a strange roommate,” wailed Mabel, also in tears. “And I don’t even know what she looks like.”
“You’ll be so busy studying that you won’t have time to miss Lakeville,” assured Mr. Black. “Now run back like good girls so I can catch my train. I’ll send you a great big box of candy from Chicago tomorrow and new friends will flock about you like flies.”
Before many hours had passed, Mabel discovered that a strange roommate was not so bad after all because Isabelle Carew of Kentucky had arrived two days earlier and knew when to go to bed, when to get up, where to find the class rooms and most important of all, the dining room. Mabel thoroughly enjoyed imparting her new knowledge to her Lakeville friends.
Each day, they discovered, was divided into sections of forty minutes each, and each section was filled to the brim. A bell rang every forty minutes—Sallie had to ring it.
“And my goodness!” said weary Mabel, during visiting hour, when the five friends were stretched at length across Henrietta’s narrow bed, “it’s just awful to jump up and do something different every time that bell rings.”
“Never mind,” soothed Henrietta, “we don’t have to do a single thing from three in the afternoon until six, except on walking days. We don’t have to go to gym from two to three unless we want to. We don’t have to study evenings unless we like but except on dancing nights we have to stay in our own rooms and keep quiet in case anybody does want to study.”
“Or rest,” groaned Mabel.
“There’s kind of a woodsy grove over that way—south, I guess,” said Jean. “We can go as far as the road, Cora says. She’s that thin girl with freckles—an old girl. Sometimes you can find nuts; and, in the spring, there are lots of wild flowers.”
“Spring will never get here,” groaned Marjory.
“We aren’t allowed to go to town at all,” said Jean, “except sometimes to lectures and concerts at the Theological Seminary, and there’s a regular shopping day sometimes. Cora says it isn’t a bit like it was here last year—a great many things have been changed. All the teachers, for one thing. There’s a secret. Something happened, but she says that Doctor Rhodes took all the old girls into his office as soon as they came and made them promise not to tell the new girls—or anybody.”
“The teachers,” said Henrietta, “are a bunch of freaks and as near as I can make out most of them are related to Doctor Rhodes. I had physical geography from his poor old cousin, Emily Rhodes; and a music lesson from his daughter, Julia Rhodes.”
“His daughter-in-law, Mrs. Henry Rhodes, teaches painting and needlework,” said Jean. “She’s rather pleasant, I think.”
“Anyway,” said Mabel, “that French teacher isn’t related. And I don’t think Miss Woodruff is.”
Marjory sat up suddenly and giggled.
“What’s the joke?” demanded Henrietta.
“Mabel made friends with Miss Woodruff this morning in mathematics. She is just about the tallest and stoutest person you ever did see. Mabel asked her if she hadn’t been teaching a great many years. Miss Woodruff said, ‘Why, no; how old do you think I am?’ Mabel looked her up and down carefully and said: ‘About seventy-five.’”
“Oh, Mabel!”
“Well,” confessed Mabel, “I honestly didn’t see how anybody could grow to such a size in less than seventy-five years. Why! She’s the very biggest woman I ever saw.”
“She’ll have it in for you,” laughed Henrietta.
“I like Sallie Dickinson,” said Bettie. “But I’m sort of sorry for her, too. She has to give out all the mail because she’s the only person who never gets any and she has to help in the kitchen sometimes, cleaning silver and things like that. And ringing that horrid bell. It isn’t any wonder her legs are so thin—always running up and down stairs and through all those long halls.”
“I like Maude Wilder,” said Jean. “She’s full of fun and she throws stones just like a boy.”
“I don’t care about Isabelle,” confessed Mabel. “She says she’s engaged.”
“Engaged!” squealed Marjory. “How old is she?”
“About fifteen. She says southern girls are always engaged. She talked about nothing but boys last night and she says she’s afraid she’s falling in love with the history teacher—Mr. James Carter.”
“I saw him,” said Henrietta. “I should think if any man were perfectly safe from being fallen in love with, he was. He’s an ugly, near-sighted little brute with black whiskers and shabby shoes—another relative of Doctor Rhodes, Maude says. I guess Isabelle is just naturally sentimental like a silly maid Grandmother had once. She’ll have a sweet time getting sympathy out of Mabel, won’t she?”
“She’s writing sort of a continued letter to her Clarence,” laughed unsentimental Mabel. “He’s a silly looking thing, too. I saw his picture in her locket. She wears it night and day.”
“I suppose,” teased Henrietta, “you’re going to write to Laddie Lombard?”
“Of course I am, but that’s different. He’s just a regular boy—not a beau.”
“It’s time we were dressing for dinner,” said Jean, prodding her lazy companions. “We should have been outdoors all this time.”
“I’m worried about dinner,” confessed Mabel. “Sallie says that beginning with tonight we have to ask for everything in French and I don’t know enough French to ask for a stewed prune.”
“You don’t have to,” laughed Bettie, “we have those for breakfast.”
“It’s all right anyway,” said Marjory. “Cora says that the girls at our table have a secret code—Maude invented it as soon as she heard about the French. This is it. You punch your next door neighbor once for bread, twice for butter, three times for pickles, four times for potatoes. One pinch means sugar and two pinches for cream. We never get any more meat anyway so there isn’t anything for that. Of course you mustn’t get your pinches and punches mixed up. But isn’t that a grand scheme for beginners in French?”
“Ye-es,” admitted Mabel, doubtfully, “but you see, I sit next to Miss Woodruff. What if I forget and punch her?”