The Jolliest School of All

by Angela Brazil

Lorna's Enemy

For the next two weeks Irene and Lorna were strictly "gated," a great deprivation, for it would have been their turns to go shopping with Miss Morley, and Irene at least was anxious to sample some of the quaint wares spread forth so temptingly in the Fossato stores. With the exception of church-going they did not have a chance to step outside the grounds of the Villa Camellia. The Sunday expedition came as a welcome relief to break the monotony. The school liked the little British church at Fossato. It was so utterly different from anything to which they had been accustomed in England or America. To begin with it was not an ecclesiastical building at all, but simply a big room in the basement of the Hôtel Anglais. The walls had been exquisitely decorated by a French artist with conventionalized designs of iris in purple and gold, and through the windows there was a gorgeous peep over the bay. The girls used to exercise much maneuvering to secure the seats with the best view, and somehow that bright stretch of the Mediterranean seemed to blend in as part and parcel of all the praise and thanksgiving that was being offered.

Punctually at twenty minutes to eleven on Sunday mornings the fifty-six pupils and the seven mistresses would leave the great gate of the Villa Camellia and march into the town, along the esplanade under the grove of palm trees, then through the beautiful sheltered garden of the Hôtel Anglais, where many exotic flowers and shrubs were blooming and the white arum lilies were like an Easter festival, to the doorway, under the jessamine-covered veranda, that led to the Eglise anglaise et américaine. The school practically made half the congregation, but there were visitors from the various hotels, and a sprinkling of British residents who had houses at Fossato. When the service was over there followed a very pleasant quarter of an hour in the piazza of the hotel; the clergyman and his wife would speak personally to many of the girls, and any of the pupils who met friends were allowed to talk to them. Fossato was a popular week-end resort from Naples, so relatives often turned up on Sundays and there were many joyous reunions. Kind little Canon Clark and his small bird-like wife were great favorites at the Villa Camellia. They were always invited to school functions, and each term the girls, in relays of about ten at a time, were offered hospitality at the "Villa Bleue," a tiny dwelling that served as parsonage for the British chaplain. To go to tea at the dear wee house—color-washed blue, and with pink geraniums in its window-boxes—was considered a treat, and Irene and Lorna looked very glum indeed when Miss Rodgers kept severely to their punishment, and substituted Agnes and Elsie for themselves in the next contingent of guests.

"You'll go later on," consoled Peachy. "Miss Rodgers is really very decent in that way. She'll see that you get your turn once in a term at any rate. Last time I went we had hot brown scones and molasses. Oh, they were good! There! I oughtn't to have told you that when your turn's off. Never mind. It will be something to look forward to. We always play paper games there, and they're such fun. There I am again! Well, if you went to-day it would be over and done with by to-morrow, and it's still all to come. That's one way of taking it."

"Oh, it's all very well to moralize!" grumped Lorna, who was feeling thoroughly cross. "It's easy enough to count up other people's blessings. I'm a blighted blossom!"

"Poor little thing!

She lived all the winter

And died in the spring,"

quoted Peachy with an extra wide grin. "Cheer up! Don't you realize it's only ten days to half-term? Oh, do, for goodness' sake, look less like a statue of melancholy! Do you know, child, that you're getting permanent wrinkles along that forehead of yours, and it makes you more like fifty than fifteen. You're too sedate. That's what's the matter with you, Lorna Carson! It's a fault that ought to be overcome. Copy Delia and me. We know how to enjoy ourselves. There—my lecture is over and now let's talk of earthquakes."

"It's all very well for you, you've got everything you want," murmured Lorna bitterly under her breath. "Some people haven't half the luck, and it's hard to be content with a short allowance and pretend you're the same as every one else. It can't always be done."

She turned away as she said it, so Peachy only caught the sound of a grumble and did not hear the actual words. Had she done so she might possibly have exhibited more sympathy, for she was a very kind-hearted girl. Neither she nor anybody at the Villa Camellia understood Lorna in the least. So far their classmate had been somewhat of a chestnut-bur, and nobody in the Transition had ever penetrated her husk of reserve. There is generally a reason for most things in life, if we could only know it, and poor Lorna's morose and hermit attitude at school was really the result of matters at home. To get into her innermost confidence we must follow her to Naples on her half-term holiday and see for ourselves the peculiar circumstances amid which she had been placed, and the disadvantages that had caused her to differ from other girls.

Lorna's family was the smallest possible, for it consisted only of her father. Nobody at the Villa Camellia had ever seen Mr. Carson—not even Miss Rodgers. He had communicated with her by writing when he wished to place his daughter at the school, but he had never paid a single visit to Fossato. He pleaded stress of business as the excuse for this remissness, but Lorna herself knew only too well that he had no intention of coming. Except to the office at which he was employed he never went to any place where he would be likely to meet English visitors. The furnished rooms where he lived were in the strictly Italian portion of Naples, and not in the vicinity of the big hotels. Secretly Lorna dreaded her holidays. There was nothing for her to do while her father was at the office. She was not allowed to go out alone, and unless she could induce fat Signora Fiorenza, their landlady, to be philanthropic and chaperon her to look at the shops, she was obliged to amuse herself in the house during the day as best she could. In the evening things were certainly better. Her father would take her to dine at an Italian restaurant, and would sometimes treat her to a performance at a theater or cinema close at hand, or would escort her for a lamplight walk along the streets, but these brief expeditions were evidently made out of a sense of duty, and Mr. Carson was plainly unhappy until he was once more ensconced in his own sitting-room with his favorite books and his reading-lamp. He had seen so little of his daughter during the five years they had lived at Naples that, though in a sense he was fond of her, she was more of an embarrassment to him than an asset. Lorna realized this only too keenly. Her sensitive disposition shrank away from her father. She was shy in his presence, and never knew what to say to him. She seemed always aware of some enormous shadow that hung over their lives and darkened the daylight. What this was she had no means of guessing, but it was emphatically there. She had learned, by bitter experience, never to ask to be taken to the fashionable portions of the city; she knew that the sound of a voice speaking English at a neighboring table was enough to cause her father to finish his meal in a hurry and leave the restaurant. They never went to the British Church, and even such cosmopolitan spots as the aquarium or the museum were equally taboo.