There was a sudden rustling noise. “Hark! There’s someone in this room,” Peggy announced.
The girl in hiding sprang up. “I’m terribly sorry, girls,” she said. “I didn’t want to eavesdrop. I was crouching down so that I could leap out and surprise you when you came over by the fire, as I supposed of course you would.”
With a glad cry of surprise her friends surrounded Geraldine, asking a dozen questions at once. How did she happen to be there? Was she going to stay?
And when she had answered them all satisfactorily, Merry announced: “This is like a play. Characters enter just when they’re needed.”
Geraldine’s face was beaming. “O, I am so glad, if I am wanted even,” she told them. “I can’t understand, though, how I can be needed.”
“We’ll have to tell you later,” the president announced. “The ten-minute recess is over. Hear that cruel gong! Now, Gerry, what class are you to start in?”
“Miss Demorest said that if I would accompany Merry Lee everywhere that she went, I couldn’t go wrong.”
“Oh, goodie-good!” Betty Byrd exclaimed. “That means we are all in Miss Preen’s English class.”
“Shh! Come on!” Rose called to them from the open doorway.
Merry introduced the new pupil to the angular Miss Preen and Geraldine thought she never had seen a thinner person or one with sharper eyes. She felt sure that she would heartily dislike the English teacher, but what did that matter as long as she was in the class with all of her friends.