"Well, look here, Geraldine Wilmott, this is my cubie. You won't mind changing into Number Twenty-Nine instead, will you? Phyllis Tressider and I have always slept in next-door cubicles ever since we first came to school."
"And that's the very reason you are to be separated now," said a voice behind them, and turning round in dismay the two friends saw the redoubtable Sister herself regarding them with a grimly humorous smile. "It's just because you and Phyllis always have been together that you're being moved. There were complaints enough of you last term, and if I'd had my way you'd have been in different dormitories altogether. But Miss Oakley said to give you one more chance, so I'm trying what the effect of putting you at opposite ends of the dormitory may be. You just leave Geraldine Wilmott alone, and get to work and unpack your boxes. And mind you put the things away tidily—I shall be coming round to inspect the drawers after tea." And Sister moved on down the dormitory, leaving two very disconsolate damsels behind her.
"Bother!" said Dorothy crossly. "I suppose there's no help for it, now. I shall have to go to Number Twenty-Nine." And with a scowl at the innocently offending new girl, she marched off to inspect her new cubicle with an aggrieved air.
Left to herself, Geraldine pulled her curtain again, and curled herself up rather forlornly upon the bed. In spite of the brave resolutions she had made when she left home that morning not to cry or show her home-sickness, no matter how lonely or miserable she might be, the tears were very near her eyes at that moment. And a devastating feeling of shyness and fearfulness, which was the bugbear of her existence, descended upon her mind.
For of all the shy, nervous, frightened girls of fifteen that ever were, Geraldine Wilmott was surely the most shy and nervous and frightened! It was not her own fault. She had always been a delicate, highly-strung child, while a severe illness when she was seven years old had not improved matters. And then, three years ago, during the War, she had been in an air-raid, and the sights and sounds she had seen and heard that night had left an indelible impression upon her nervous system. She was fully aware of her own failings—almost morbidly so—and she did her best to struggle against the fears that so constantly beset her. But it was uphill work, and even the three years of peace and quiet in the country house her parents had taken, after the doctor had said that a country life was imperative for the little girl, if her nerves were to be saved, had not altogether accomplished a cure.
And now at last the doctor had prescribed boarding-school as a remedy for the nervousness.
"I really think it is worth giving it a trial, Mrs. Wilmott," he had said. "There is nothing wrong with the child's health. It is purely mental, and I believe that the society of other girls will do more for her now than all the care and anxiety you lavish upon her at home. Send her to a first-class school, a really big one. Don't make arrangements for any special privileges—just let her mingle with the other girls as though she were a perfectly normal child. She will never get the better of this nervousness while you spoil and pamper her at home."
"Really, I don't think I've spoilt her," began Mrs. Wilmott in some distress, but the specialist interrupted her.
"No, I dare say you haven't, in the accepted sense of the word," he said, with a smile. "And, of course, cosseting and pampering were what she needed when you first brought her to me. Her nerves were all to pieces, and school was the last thing I should have recommended then. But now it is different. She is—how old did you say? Nearly fifteen? More than old enough to go to school! And really there is no earthly reason why you should keep her at home any longer. She is perfectly healthy and well so far as her physical health is concerned, and I have no fear of a nervous breakdown now, so long as she isn't overworked. After a term or two at school I think you will find that she quite overcomes this shyness and nervous fear of things. Try it, at any rate, Mrs. Wilmott. It can do no harm, and it may do all the good in the world."
And so Geraldine's lessons with her resident governess came to an end, together with her quiet country life; and she found herself in Cubicle Thirteen in the Pink Dormitory at Wakehurst Priory, with all the unknown horrors of a first term at school waiting her.