“Yes, darling; mother understands. And you are safe home, now, thanks to that dear, bright boy. We won’t say any more about it,” answered gentle Lucy Waring.
But, although nothing more was said—for Lucy had contrived somehow to silence even Miss Sophia—Stella seemed to everybody a good deal older, after her Wild West adventure. She was now nearly fifteen, and the eager, child-like wish to belong was already partly obscured by the more womanly and deeper desire to help. She wrote to Blue Earth, in their own tongue, and received in the course of a week or two a soiled scrawl in reply, saying only that the baby was well now. There seemed nothing more to be done for them, or for any of her own people—not just now, at any rate—and the girl set herself in good earnest to be a real help to the kind people of her adoption.
So she rose an hour earlier every morning, and quietly took upon herself more of the burden of household duties, turning them off so dexterously that Lucy Waring, who had failed perceptibly in the past year, accepted the relief almost unconsciously, and even Miss Sophia had no open fault to find.
“If I could only please Miss Sophia,” grieved Yellow Star. “But I know I never can, for I can’t change myself into something else. She dislikes me because I am Indian,” was the unspoken thought, and it cut deep.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RIGHT STUFF
When September came round, Stella entered the old academy with Doris and Cynthia and the rest, and found a new and absorbing world opening before her. Laurel academy was an endowed school, and a really good one, with better-paid teachers and more up-to-date equipment than the little town could have provided out of its own slender resources.
Ethan had been duly graduated and was going away to college, where for two or three momentous years the girls were seldom to see him, since he was “working his way through,” and found it necessary to devote the long vacations to more paying, though not half so pleasant things as doing “chores” for kind old Uncle Si.