"How we've misjudged her," sighed Laura May.
"I thought it was funny she came here when she's so old. She must be eighteen, isn't she?" asked Kittie.
"Pretty near. I'd elope and defy my cruel parents if I was eighteen, but she says she won't elope—that she'll wait until she's twenty-one, and then if her father won't give in, and can't show her anything bad about the man, she'll marry him anyhow. Miss Lucilla had a talk with her, and she said Katharine seemed to be a very nice girl and very reasonable except when it came to breaking off her love affair, but that she was just as stubborn as a rock about that."
"What do you suppose they'll do?"
Amelia meditated, turning the searchlight of memory upon her favourite novels.
"Well, she may waste away. She's pretty thin. I guess her father would feel dreadful when he stood by her deathbed. And then her lover may persuade her to fly with him. I wish she'd let me help her fly. Or she may just wait till she's twenty-one and then leave home with her father's curses on her head, and if she did that her mother'd probably die of grief, and everything her father'd touch would fail, and finally he'd be a lonely, miserable old man and send for Katharine to forgive him, and she'd bring her little daughter to him and——"
"Why, Amelia Bowers!" protested Kittie, whose slow brain had been following the rapid pace with difficulty, and who had not lost her schoolmate in the cursed and married heroine.
"Well, it's pretty dreadful any way you fix it. She's a Blighted Being," said Amelia cheerfully. "We must be very considerate of her. Good-night."
She hurried away, intent upon spreading her news before the "lights-out" bell should ring, and with each telling the tale grew in detail and picturesqueness.
The next morning the girls began being considerate of Katharine. If the Blighted Being noticed the sudden change of attitude it must have occasioned her some wonder, if not considerable annoyance. She was not a girl to air her wrongs nor bid for sympathy, although she was not brave enough to assume a cheerful manner and keep her heartache out of her face. She learned her lessons, did her tasks, was respectful to the teachers, polite to the girls, but she held aloof from everyone—was, in the arrogant fashion of youth, absorbed in her own unhappiness. Occasionally, when she met Belinda's smiling, friendly eyes, her face softened and an answering smile hovered around her sensitive lips, but the relaxing went no further.