"Gipsy Latimer, understand once for all that these things are not allowed at Briarcroft. While you are here you will be expected to keep the rules of the school, or, if you break them, you will be punished. Leave my study at once, and don't report yourself here again until you are sent for."
Gipsy left the room as requested, but she stood for a moment or two on the doormat outside, shaking her head solemnly.
"It's a bad lookout!" she said to herself. "I'm afraid there are breakers ahead. That's not a very difficult matter to foresee. She's got a temper! I've not had any previous experience of English schools, but it rather appears as if this one's run on the lines of a reformatory. If I don't want to get myself into trouble, I shall have to lie low, and mind what I'm doing. Well, I've sampled the teachers, and I've sampled the boarders. Now for the day girls and my new Form!"
Gipsy had already made the acquaintance of the elect twenty who were to be her house companions, but that was a comparatively slight affair compared with the ordeal of her introduction to the school as a whole. In spite of her outward appearance of sangfroid, she felt her heart thumping a little as she marched into the large lecture hall for "call over". It needs a certain courage to face seventy-two critical strangers, and her past experience had taught her that a new girl on her first day is like "goods on approval", and has to run the gauntlet of public opinion. She tried to look airy and unembarrassed, and talked desperately to Lennie Chapman, who had been told off to "personally conduct" her to her Form; but all the same she was conscious that she was the observed of all observers. It was only natural that the little, erect, dark figure, with its bright eyes and big scarlet hair ribbons, should attract attention. Gipsy was about as different from the ordinary run of British schoolgirls as a parakeet is from a flock of pigeons; and the others were quick to note the difference.
"I say, who's that foreign kid?" enquired Madeleine Newsome, a member of the Fifth, pausing in a friendly quarrel with a Form mate to take a quick, comprehensive survey of the stranger's personal appearance.
"Can't say, I'm sure," responded Emily Atkinson, "but we'll soon find out. Hello, you kid, what's your name? And what part of the globe do you spring from?"
"She's Spanish and American and New Zealand and South African and several other things, and she's been shipwrecked dozens of times," began Lennie Chapman, who was prone to exaggerate, and liked to act showman.
"Let her speak for herself," interrupted Madeleine bluntly. "I suppose she understands English, doesn't she? What's your name, kid? Don't stand staring at me with those big black eyes!"
But here Gipsy's momentary bashfulness took flight. Seven schools had taught her to hold her own, and she was soon imparting information about herself with a volubility that left no doubt of her acquaintance with the English tongue. Other girls hurried up to listen, and in less than a minute she was the centre of a crowd, answering a perfect fire of questions with a beaming good humour and a quickness of repartee that rather took the fancy of her hearers.
"She's sharp enough, at any rate," commented Mary Parsons. "Not very easy to take a rise out of her, I should think."