When the dinner-bell rang, Eleanor pulled herself together and started down-stairs.
“Did you get your note, Miss Watson?” asked Adelaide Rich from the dining-room door.
“What note?” demanded Eleanor sharply.
“I’m sure I can’t describe it. It was on the hall table,” said Adelaide, turning away wrathfully. Some people were so grateful if you tried to do them a favor!
It was this incident which led Eleanor to hurry off after dinner, and again at the end of the play, bound to escape nerve-racking questions and congratulations. Later, when Betty knocked on her door, her first impulse was to let her in and ask her advice. But a second thought suggested that it was safer to confide in nobody. The next morning she was glad of the second thought, for things looked brighter, and it would have been humiliating indeed to be discovered making a mountain out of a mole-hill.
“The trouble with Caroline was that she wasn’t willing to work hard,” she told herself. “Now I care enough to do anything, and I must make them see it.”
She devoted her spare hours on Monday morning to “making them see it,” with that rare combination of tact and energy that was Eleanor Watson at her best. By noon her fears of being sent home were almost gone, and she was alert and exhilarated as she always was when there were difficulties to be surmounted.
“Now that the play is over, I’m going to work hard,” Betty announced at lunch, and Eleanor, who was still determined not to confide in anybody, added nonchalantly, “So am I.” It was going to be the best of the fun to take in the Chapin house.
But the Chapin house was not taken in for long.
“What’s come over Eleanor Watson?” inquired Katherine, a few days later, as the girls filed out from dinner.