“Another girl!” cried Carin in dismay. “What girl, please, mamma?” She had sprung to her feet, and stood before her mother with the color sweeping over her face; but Azalea, keeping her thoughts to herself, grew paler, and pinched the edge of the table in her effort to keep the tears of vexation and disappointment from coming to her eyes.
Another girl! And this perfect possession of Carin would be taken from her, and there’d be, as Carin put it, need to “explain” all of the time. How could Mrs. Carson spoil such a perfect thing as their association there? Who else would love to study, and to write, and paint and sing the way they did? Who else would make a game out of it all, and long to get to the schoolroom in the morning and hate to leave at night?
“It’s Annie Laurie Pace,” went on Mrs. Carson, apparently taking no heed of their misery. “Have you met her? Perhaps not, since she goes to the Baptist Meeting House, and you, Azalea, are such a faithful young Methodist, and Carin goes with me to the Episcopal Church. But anyway, I think you must have seen her—a tall girl, with red hair. She’s been helping me some at The Mountain Industries rooms, and I’ve become well acquainted with her. She’s ahead of anything she can get at the district school. Of course I don’t mean that she couldn’t do more mathematics and that sort of thing, but I am convinced that she has a strength and originality of thought which is very unusual. She came here this morning to borrow some books I had offered to lend her, and I have been talking with her for the last hour. I am so convinced that the work here under Miss Parkhurst and with you two shining little stars will give her precisely what she is hungering for, that I have invited her to join you.”
“But, mamma,” expostulated Carin, “we’ll be wretched with her! She’s a nice enough girl, I’m sure, and no doubt she’s bright, but she’ll never be able to really understand Azalea and me, will she, Azalea?”
Azalea said nothing. She was dreadfully embarrassed. She was wondering if Mrs. Carson had some secret reason for forcing another girl in with them? Could it possibly be that she—Azalea—who had been a wandering child, traveling with coarse people in a low circus, was, without knowing it, doing harm to Carin? Perhaps. Carin was so fine, so gay, so sweet, so “like a flower” as the song had it which Mrs. Carson sang, that very likely she seemed no more than a weed beside her.
“Probably that is all I am—a horrid, stupid weed,” said Azalea to herself bitterly as her thoughts flashed this way and that like troubled birds, seeking for what was wrong.
“You can see how Azalea hates the idea, mamma,” said Carin. “And as for me, if that girl comes in here, my education will be ruined.”
She looked a haughty and determined young person as she stood there, her chin lifted and her blue eyes darting cold fires. Mrs. Carson had a twinkle in her eye as she surveyed her. Carin had been a gentle princess in the schoolroom, with Miss Parkhurst for her willing guide and Azalea her adoring servitor. The truth was, the two girls had become so bound up in each other that they saw nothing beyond their own horizon. The dark-eyed girl from the mountain cabin, with her strange, romantic history, and the blue-eyed one from the mansion, loving romance above all imaginable things, had made a compact of undying friendship; and unconsciously, they had also determined to exclude the rest of the world.
“It may seem a little hard for you and Azalea to take Annie Laurie in just at first, Carin,” Mrs. Carson went on, with no show of yielding—indeed, quite as if everything were settled—“but she desperately needs the schooling, and I believe that, without realizing it, you need her. What do you think, Miss Parkhurst; am I right?”
To the increasing dismay of the friends, Helena Parkhurst nodded her nice little head.