So she borrowed her fare of Madame Schakael and took the first train home; and Pinewood Hall never saw her again. Indeed, the girls she left behind scarcely heard of Grace Montgomery. She never wrote to Cora, even; and had Bob Endress not come over from Cornell for the New Year dance, Nancy and Jennie would not have heard much about her.
“They have all gone back to California,” said Bob, who did not at all understand the rights of the matter. “Somehow the Senator has lost most of his money, and they had just enough left to buy a little fruit ranch down in the state somewhere. Too bad!”
Nancy did not explain. Why should she have injured his cousin in his estimation? But she and Bob remained very good friends.
Nancy lived quite as plainly as she had before. She saw no reason for changing her mode of living because the lawyers told her there were great sums of money in store for her.
That summer, however, she did insist on taking the entire Bruce family to the mountains as her guests; for they had been very kind to her, and that while she was still “A Little Miss Nobody.”
Mr. Gordon had gone back to his practice ere this. He was much aged in appearance and would always walk with a limp; but his confidential clerk, a certain red-haired youth in whom Jennie Bruce would always have a particular interest, was at hand to take the burden of work from the lawyer’s shoulders when need came.
Perhaps Patrick Sarsfield O’Brien outstripped everybody else in the changes that came. In six months (during which he diligently applied himself to the night school course) he shed his slang like a mantle. Instead of cheap detective stories hidden in his desk, he had text-books.
He is, in fact, a rising young man, and will be a good lawyer some day. Mr. Gordon is very proud of him.
And so is Nancy. Scorch was her first friend, and she will never forget him or cease to be interested in his growth and welfare.
Nancy and Jennie are climbing the scholastic hill together. Already the girls and teachers of the Hall are beginning to brag about Nancy Nelson. She stands at the head of her class, she is stroke of the school eight, champion on the ice, and has won a state tennis championship medal in the yearly tournament of school clubs. She is no longer “A Little Miss Nobody.”