The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Emmy, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

ILLUSTRATED BY
Copyright, 1913 By L. C. Page & Company (INCORPORATED) ————— All rights reserved First Impression, April, 1913 Second Impression, January, 1914 THE COLONIAL PRESS C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.

The Reverend Thomas Wilson's sister, Miss Sophronia, had come to Sunbridge on a Tuesday evening late in June to make her brother's family a long-promised visit. But it was not until the next morning that she heard something that sent her to her sister-in-law in a burst of astonishment almost too great for words.
For pity's sake, Mary, what is this I hear? she demanded. Edith insists that her cousin, Cordelia, is going to Texas next week—to Texas!— Cordelia!
Yes, she is, Sophronia, replied the minister's wife, trying to make her answer sound as cheerful and commonplace as she could, and as if Texas were in the next room. (It was something of a trial to Mrs. Thomas Wilson that her husband's sister could not seem to understand that she, a minister's wife for eighteen years and the mother of five children, ought to know what was proper and right for her orphaned niece to do—at least fully as much as should a spinster, who had never brought up anything but four cats and a parrot!) Edith is quite right. Cordelia is going to Texas next week.
But, Mary, are you crazy? To let a child like that go all the way from here to Texas—one would think New Hampshire and Texas were twenty miles apart!
Mrs. Wilson sighed a little wearily.
Cordelia isn't exactly a child, Sophronia, you must remember that. She was sixteen last November; and she's very self-reliant and capable for her age, too. Besides, she isn't going alone, you know.
Alone! exclaimed Miss Sophronia. Mary, surely, the rest that Edith said isn't true! Those other girls aren't going, too, are they?—Elsie Martin, and that flyaway Tilly Mack, and all?