Mrs. Grayson had permitted Dorothy and Nancy to call her “Aunt Charlotte,” and now it had become the loving title by which all her pupils addressed her.
She was eager to have her little class assemble, and, wondering if they were late, she looked at her watch.
“Quarter of nine,” she said, and as if he understood what she had said, Pompey blinked up at the tall clock, yawned, and looked at the door.
The sound of merry voices made him prick up his ears. A moment more, and Dorothy and Nancy, Mollie and Flossie, Nina and Jeanette Earl ran up the steps and in at the open door. Pompey received his usual number of love-pats, and then the girls, having hung their hats and coats in the hall, walked quietly in to greet Aunt Charlotte.
It was a fixed rule at the private school that there should never be any haste in reaching places in the schoolroom.
“It matters not that you are little girls, or that you are at school,” Mrs. Grayson would say; “let me always have the pleasure of seeing you enter the class-room in as gentle a manner as you would enter a drawing-room,” and her pupils took pleasure in doing as she wished.
The broad window-seats were banked with flowering plants, and as the children took their places they thought it the brightest, cheeriest schoolroom in the world.
As if to show that he also had a place in Aunt Charlotte's class, Pompey ran across the floor and sprang up into a space on one window-seat between two large flowerpots, where he could enjoy a sun-bath.
Katie Dean, with her little Cousin Reginald, now entered, just in time to avoid being late.
“I thought you said your cousin was coming,” whispered Mollie, but Aunt Charlotte had opened her Testament, and was commencing to read, so Nina only shook her head, and Mollie saw that she must wait until recess to know what Nina would say.