CHAPTER II
"THE KING'S CALL"
Left to herself in the room which she was to occupy for the year, Mary stood looking around with the keen interest of an explorer. It was a pleasant room, with two windows looking out over the river and two over the garden. To an ordinary observer it had no claim to superiority over the other apartments, but to Mary it was a sort of shrine. Here in the low chair by the window her Princess Winsome had sat to read and study and dream all through her school days.
Here was the mirror that had caught her passing reflection so often, that it still seemed to hold a thousand shadowy semblances of her in its shining depths. Only the June before (three short months ago) she had stood in front of it in all the glory of her Commencement gown.
Mary crossed the room on tiptoe, smiling at the recollection of one of her early make-believes. Oh, if it were only true that one could pass through the looking-glass into the wonderland behind it, what a charming picture gallery she would find! All the girls who had occupied the room since Warwick Hall had been a school! Blue eyes and brown, laughing faces and wistful ones, girls in gorgeous full dress, pluming themselves for some evening entertainment, girls in dainty undress and unbound hair, exchanging bed-time confidences as they prepared for the night, ambitious little saints and frivolous little sinners—they were all there, somewhere in the dim background of the mirror, and because of them there was a subtle charm about the room to Mary, which she would not have felt if she had been its first occupant.
"It's like opening an old drawer to drop in a handful of fresh rose-leaves, and finding it sweet with the roses of a dozen Junes gone by," she said to herself, so pleased with the fancy that she went on elaborating it.
"And Lloyd has been here so lately that her rose-leaves haven't even begun to wither."
There is no loyalty like the loyalty of a little school-girl for the older girl whom she has enshrined in her heart as her ideal; no sentiment like the intense admiration which puts a halo around everything the beloved voice ever praised, or makes sacred everything the beloved fingers have touched. Mary Ware at sixteen had not outgrown any of the ardent admiration for Lloyd Sherman which had seized her when she was only eleven, and now the desire to be like her flared up stronger than ever.
She peered wistfully into the mirror, thinking, "Maybe just being in her old room will help, because I shall be reminded of her at every turn."