To make the afternoon more festive, there was to be a tea stall, to which the girls brought contributions of cakes, and music was to be given from the platform, so that the scene might resemble a café chantant. Ingred had been chosen as one of the artistes, and arrayed in her best brown velveteen dress, with a new pale-yellow hair ribbon, she waited about in her usual agonies of stage fright. Learning from Dr. Linton, however improving it might be to her touch, was hardly conducive to self-complacency, and, after having suffered much vituperation for her imperfect rendering of a piece, it was decidedly appalling to have to play it in public, especially with the horrible possibility that at any moment her master might happen to pop in to view the exhibition and arrive in time for her performance.
"I shall have forty fits if I see him in the room, I know I shall!" she confided to Fil. "You've no idea how he scares me. I have my lessons on the study piano generally, and if only he would sit still I shouldn't mind, but he will get up and prowl about the room, and swing out his arms when he's explaining things; he only just missed knocking over that pretty statuette of Venus the other day. I'm sure if Miss Burd knew how he flourishes about, she wouldn't let him loose among her cherished ornaments!"
"Perhaps he won't turn up to-day!"
"Oh yes! He said he should make a point of buying a toy for his little boy. If I break down suddenly in the midst of my piece, you'll know the reason. I'm shaking now."
"Poor old sport! Don't take it so hard!"
By three o'clock the lecture hall was filled with what Lilias Ashby (who had undertaken to write a report for the school magazine) described as "a distinguished crowd." Fathers indeed were as few and far between as currants in a war pudding, but mothers, aunts, and sisters had responded nobly to the invitations, and were being conducted round by the girls to see their special exhibits.
Mrs. Saxon had been unable to come that afternoon, but Quenrede had turned up, looking very pretty in a plum-colored hat, and giving herself slight airs as of one who is now a finished young lady, and no longer a mere schoolgirl. She chatted, in rather mincing tones, to Miss Burd herself, while Ingred stood by in awe and amazement, and when she bought a cup of tea from Doreen Hayward at the refreshment stall, she murmured: "Oh, thanks so much!" with the manner of a patroness, though only six months ago she and Doreen had sat side by side in the Science Lectures. It was a new phase of Quenrede, which, though accepted to some extent at home, had never shown itself before with quite such aggravated symptoms.
Ingred, walking as it were in her shadow, was not sure whether to admire or laugh. It was, of course, something to have such a pretty and decidedly stylish sister; she appreciated the angle at which the plum-colored hat was set, and the self-restraint that made the tiny iced bun last such an enormous time, when a schoolgirl would have finished it in three bites, and have taken another. A grand manner was certainly rather an asset to the family, and Queenie was palpably impressing some of the intermediates, who poked each other to look at her.
"It's my turn to play soon, and I'm just shivering!" whispered Ingred.
"Nonsense, child! Don't be such a little goose!" declared her sister airily. "It's only a school party—there's really nothing to make a fuss about!"