Shortly before Christmas, Jean’s father, Mr. Mapes, turned up just in time to whisk the Lakeville youngsters aboard their train. The girls were so glad to see a friend from home that they all but wept tears of joy. Quiet Mr. Mapes was quite pleased and embarrassed at their rapturous greeting—even Henrietta having surprised him with a kiss.
“We’d be glad to see even a beggar from home,” explained Mabel earnestly and with her usual frankness—and wondered why Mr. Mapes laughed.
Mabel was to visit among her friends for the holidays. All the other Highland Hall girls except homeless Sallie, Virginia Mason (a quiet girl from far away Oregon) and poor old Abbie, who wasn’t exactly a girl, departed to their homes for a two weeks’ vacation.
It wouldn’t be possible to describe all the Christmas gifts that the happy Lakeville girls received; but some of the more unusual ones deserve mention. From Germany, Mrs. Bennett sent to each of the five girls a lovely little Dresden pin of exquisite enamel. Mrs. Lombard, the grateful mother of Laddie, the rescued castaway, presented to each a beautiful gold locket containing a pleasing picture of her attractive boy. Mrs. Slater had selected an interesting book for each of Henrietta’s chums; and from Mr. Black, each girl received a beautiful leather writing case “with a place for stamps and everything,” as Bettie said joyfully. Mrs. Crane gave each girl a five dollar gold piece. But Henrietta’s father had sent nothing to his family. This was both puzzling and alarming. He had never before failed to send wonderful gifts at Christmas time.
Of course the Lakeville girls had dispatched parcels to Sallie and had written to her; so for once the post-girl had been able to deliver much pleasant mail to herself.
There was only one trouble with that vacation. It didn’t last long enough.
“Dear me!” said Henrietta, when Mr. Black had returned them all safely to Highland Hall, “those were the shortest two weeks that ever happened.”
This second coming to Highland Hall, however, was quite different from the first; and much pleasanter. The early arrivals greeted the late comers warmly and there was much hugging and kissing in the corridors. With one exception, all the girls and all the teachers had returned. The exception was Madame Bolande.
“I’m pretty sure she was fired,” confided Sallie, inelegantly. “She was in a furious temper when she packed her trunk the day after you left. And I wish you could have seen her room afterwards. Dust and powder and rouge all over the place—I had to help Abbie clean up. She wore her stockings until the feet were gone and then threw them under the bed.”
“I knew she was too awful to last,” said Hazel Benton. “But I did think they’d be obliged to keep her for a whole year. I’m so glad they didn’t.”
At first there was no regular French teacher. Elisabeth Wilson, one of the Seniors, attempted to carry on the classes; but found it difficult to undo Madame’s faulty work. Then one of the Theological students was engaged temporarily; but so many extra girls among the day pupils decided suddenly to take French that the young Theologian fell ill from overwork. Then Henrietta offered to tide the classes over until Doctor Rhodes should hear from the agency that was to supply the new teacher.
The three Seniors were regarded by the rest of the pupils with considerable awe, and it is time that you were hearing more about them. In the first place they were quite old—sixteen or perhaps as much as seventeen; but as Seniors sometimes do, they kept their ages a dark secret. The other girls were permitted to spend only thirty cents a week for candy and other eatables. Not so the Seniors. They could spend all the money they liked, provided their parents supplied it, and they did. They could even send to Chicago for large boxes of candy or cream puffs or Angel’s food cake and eat these delectable things at any hour of the day or night, without interference. In the matter of clothes they were not restricted to middies. They could wear what they liked and they did, Eleanor Pratt was exceedingly dressy. Elisabeth Wilson was a walking fashion plate and Beatrice Holmes of Indiana, managed to out-dress them both. Occasionally, one or another of these superior young persons would condescend to pass her box of chocolates to some of the younger girls; but, for the most part, the proud and lofty Seniors, as Sallie said, flocked by themselves and were not always polite when some thoughtless young person from the lower forms “butted in.”
Their rooms were in the older part of the house and were much grander than those of the other pupils. It meant a great deal to be a Senior—you always spelled it with a very large S—at Highland Hall.
But being a Senior did not exempt Miss Pratt, Miss Wilson or Miss Holmes—never did any other pupil venture to address them as Eleanor, Elisabeth or Beatrice—from losing certain, small belongings.
Two weeks after the holidays, Miss Wilson reported the loss of a small crescent pin, set with diamonds. Miss Holmes had searched her room in vain for a valuable bracelet and Miss Pratt had broken a ten dollar bill in order to buy a quarter’s worth of stamps—and the change had vanished from her purse. Yes, she had been careless to leave it in the pocket of her coat in the cloak room; but that was no reason why any one should have taken it.
“Anyway,” said Sallie, “we know now that it isn’t Madame Bolande who is doing it; and that’s something.”
“Of course,” ventured Henrietta, “it couldn’t be one of the Rhodes family. I know there is some sort of a mystery about them. They all have sort of a queer, shifty look about them; and they all shut right up like clams when you ask questions. You can’t even pry into poor old Miss Emily’s past without frightening her. This is an old school; but except for Miss Julia I can’t believe that the Rhodes people have been here very long. Now have they, Sallie?”
“I can’t tell you a thing,” declared Sallie. “I promised not to and I can’t. There is a sort of secret. It isn’t anything very bad. It’s just something that Doctor Rhodes thinks might make a difference in the attendance if it were known—Goodness! I’ve told you more now than I meant to. Please don’t talk about it, Henrietta.”
“Of course I won’t,” promised Henrietta, “but I’m just as curious as I can be and I’m going to pump poor old Abbie.”
But poor old Abbie showed unexpected strength of mind; she put her fingers into her ears and refused to listen to Henrietta’s blandishments.
“It ain’t for me,” said Abbie, “livin’ here like I be, to be givin’ things away to prying young persons like you and that Jane Pool child that’s always pesterin’ me about my past. I know what I know but you ain’t goin’ to. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
Every week, some time between three and five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, every pupil, not excepting even the lofty Seniors, was expected to visit the huge attic above the older portion of Highland Hall. Here, arranged in a neat border all around the big room, were the girls’ trunks. Only on Saturdays were the girls permitted to visit them—it seemed, Bettie said, almost like getting back home to see them again each week.
Near the windows were benches and numerous brushes and boxes of blacking. It was here that the girls blacked their shoes, or whitened them, according to their needs. Saturday, likewise, was the day for that.
The third Saturday after Christmas, Mabel, always a little awkward, lost her balance and fell backward into an open trunk. In her efforts to save herself she clutched things as she crashed through the flimsy tray. She came up with a ribbon belt in her hand. There was an odd buckle on the belt. Mabel looked at it curiously. Bettie, polishing one of her best black shoes glanced at it too. Then she looked at Mabel and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Then both girls stooped to look at the name on the trunk. It was there in plain letters, “Gladys E. De Milligan.”
And then Gladys herself appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs with a second armful of clothing to store in her trunk. She flew at surprised Mabel like a small whirlwind and snatched the belt from her hand.
“What do you mean,” she stormed, “prying in my trunk! And taking my things. I caught you doing it—I’ll tell all the girls.”
“I didn’t pry in your trunk,” protested Mabel. “I just fell in. Goodness knows I didn’t want to skin my shoulder on your old trunk; and that belt is just what I got when I grabbed.”
“That’s the truth,” added Bettie.
Gladys locked her trunk ostentatiously, pocketed the key and marched downstairs. Mabel looked at Bettie, Bettie looked at Mabel.
“The buckle on that belt looks a lot like the one that Helen Miller made such a fuss about last fall,” said Mabel.
“I know it does.”
“Do you think we’d better say anything about it to the girls?”
“Let’s ask Jean.”
Now Jean was the kindest soul imaginable. Although she had known many things to Gladys’s disadvantage, she had kept silence herself and had influenced her little friends to keep silence likewise.
“Gladys may have found that buckle,” said Jean, “and of course it’s possible that she and Helen had buckles just alike. I don’t like Laura—I mean Gladys—but I don’t believe we’d better say anything against her to the other girls.”
“She says things against us,” said Mabel. “She told Sallie that my father was just a corn doctor and that all Bettie’s clothes came out of missionary boxes and that Marjory’s Aunty Jane took in washing—and I shan’t tell you what she said about your folks but it was just awful.”
“Well, let’s not worry about it. The girls that we like best aren’t going back on us for anything Gladys can tell them and we don’t have to be mean just because she is.”
“I suppose it is hard luck,” said Bettie, “to be born the kind of person Laura is. I agree with Jean. Let’s forget her and think of pleasant things.”
Laura was a clever girl in many ways. Naturally bright, she learned easily. Naturally rather a forward child, not easily embarrassed, she recited readily—in spite of her gum—and acquired good marks. She broke very few rules. Even that rule that every boarding school girl breaks—the one about remaining in one’s own bed from the time the bell rings for “Lights Out” until it rings again for rising, even that rule was seemingly unbroken by Laura. At any rate, no one ever caught her breaking it. She was rooming now with Victoria Webster in the North Corridor, Victoria having returned thither after the burglar scare was over.
Mrs. Henry Rhodes was matron of the North Corridor, where the Miller girls, Ruth Dennis, Alice Bailey, Hazel Benton, quiet Virginia Mason and some of the older girls roomed. Mrs. Henry, as the girls called her, was easily the most attractive member of the Rhodes family. Quite a young woman, she was both pretty and stylish in a quiet, very pleasing way. Her abundant light brown hair was coiled neatly and becomingly about her small head—she was slender—and not very tall—and Hazel Benton said that she had an aristocratic nose. Most of the girls liked and admired her.
She was not particularly severe or exacting in her duties as matron—Miss Cassandra Woodruff was made of much sterner stuff, as the West Corridor girls knew to their sorrow. Mrs. Henry had once been a boarding school girl herself, likewise a college girl, and her sympathies were with her charges. It was suspected that she didn’t consider it a crime for Dorothy Miller to slip across the hall into Ruth Dennis’s bed to giggle over some joke, or for Hazel Benton to slide into Alice Bailey’s room for a cough drop, or even for half a dozen of the girls to assemble in Dora Burl’s room for a smuggled in, midnight spread of cream puffs; so it is possible that Mrs. Henry didn’t listen, very hard when her charges prowled about at night.
In addition to being a popular matron, she had proved an excellent drawing teacher. Also her needlework classes were turning out good work. She had been married only a short time when her husband died; and, as Cora put it, looked more like a young lady than a widow.
“I wish,” groaned Maude, the day after Miss Woodruff had caught her after “Lights Out” on her way to Cora’s room with a large box of cream puffs under her arm, “that we could swap matrons with the North Corridor. Mrs. Henry knows that cream puffs have to be eaten fresh.”
“Yes,” agreed Cora, “it was certainly a crime about those cream puffs. Four dozen of them at sixty cents, besides what we gave Charles for smuggling them in. Eight of us chipped in with our whole week’s allowance. And what did old Woodsy do but keep them in her warm room all night, and then, after every last one of them had soured beyond hope, she ordered them served for the whole school for lunch.”