“You are Betty Carlyle, my dear?”
It was quite impossible to be afraid of Miss Carey. Betty suddenly thought, as she looked up and met the kind look in the headmistress’s eyes, of deep pools of blue water—deep, very deep.
But it was depths of feeling, hidden deeper still but mirrored in the eyes, which unconsciously she had noticed. Buried there were the signs of sorrows bravely borne, but hidden now; buried deep were all the troubles that life had brought her. But buried deep, too, were reserves of strength wrought from triumph over trial; reserves of sympathy gained after sorrows bravely borne. Betty did not understand this. She only somehow felt that the lines on the face which looked kindly and keenly into her own had “fallen in pleasant places”; that the eyes seemed as true as they were blue; and that the smile on the quiet lips was the sweetest smile that she had ever seen.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And you think you will be happy here, my dear?”
“Yes, only—” Betty’s voice quivered a little. For the “only” meant a great deal just then. School, wonderful though it was, seemed to hold so many mysteries still. The other girls seemed still beings apart. Just as she stood alone in the big Oak Hall now she felt alone somehow. And at home it had been so different.
“Only you do not feel in touch with our ways yet?” The voice had seemed as kind as the eyes. “To-morrow, by this time, you will feel differently, I am quite sure. And then—” Miss Carey had crossed the room while she spoke, while Betty walked at her side. Together they had reached the corridor again. “And then you may come to me at this time,” said the headmistress, “and tell me if what I say now has not come true. Now can you find your way up to your dormitory alone? Nurse is up there waiting for you, I know.”
Very few words; but Betty suddenly felt different. It had needed just that to settle her, she decided. Even although the girls seemed sometimes to speak a different language from her own, to have ways quite different from any she had known, yet soon they would be her ways too. She went upstairs on flying wings.
Flying wings, however, met with a poor reception from Nurse, the disciplinarian of the dormitories. Order and method were the burden of her speech. Betty, during the half-hour which preceded the arrival upstairs of her dormitory companions, underwent an introductory training in dormitory behaviour.
“Who packed your box for you? You yourself? You’ll pack it differently to go home with! See these creases? Fine work wasted, that’s what that is! Down to the laundry these go to-night for some one else to iron. And that’s poor thanks to the one who spent time in doing the work before!”