With sinking heart Belinda went in search of the girl. She found her practising five-finger exercises drearily in one of the music-rooms. As Belinda entered the child looked up and met the friendly, sympathetic eyes. A mute appeal sprang into her own eyes, and Belinda understood. The thing was too bad to be talked about, and the Youngest Teacher said no word about the homesickness or the expected letter. In this way she clinched her friendship with the Queer Little Thing.
But, following the principal's orders, she endeavoured to demonstrate to Bonita the joy and blessedness of life in New York. The child went quietly wherever she was taken—a mute, pathetic little figure to whom the aquarium fish and the Old Masters and the latest matinée idol were all one—and unimportant. The other girls envied her her privileges and her pocket-money, but they did not understand. No one understood save Belinda, and she did her cheerful best to blot out old loves with new impressions; but from the first she felt in her heart that she was elected to failure. The child was fond of her, always respectful, always docile, always grave. Nothing brought a light into her eyes or a spontaneous smile to her lips. Anyone save Belinda would have grown impatient, angry. She only grew more tender—and more troubled. Day by day she watched the sad little face grow thinner. It was pale now, instead of brown, and the high cheekbones were strikingly prominent. The lips pressed closely together drooped plaintively at the corners, and the big eyes were more full of shadow than ever; but the child made no protest nor plea, and by tacit consent she and Belinda ignored their first conversation and never mentioned Texas.
Often Belinda made up her mind to put aside the restraint and talk freely as she would to any other girl, but there was something about the little Texan that forbade liberties, warned off intruders, and the Youngest Teacher feared losing what little ground she had gained.
Finally she went in despair to Miss Ryder.
"The Indian character is too much for me," she confessed with a groan half humorous, half earnest. "I give it up."
"What's the matter?" asked Miss Ryder.
"Well, I've dragged poor Bonita Allen all over the borough of Manhattan and the Bronx and spent many ducats in the process. She has been very polite about it, but just as sad over Sherry's tea hour as over Grant's tomb, and just as cheerful over the Cesnola collection as over the monkey cage at the Zoo. The poor little thing is so unhappy and miserable that she looks like a wild animal in a trap, and I think the best thing we can do with her is to send her home."
"Nonsense," said Miss Lucilla. "Her father is paying eighteen hundred dollars a year."
Belinda was defiant.
"I don't care. He ought to take her home."