“What is it, do you think?” asked Margot, when she and Gretta had reached their respective desks, and were seated side by side. “She seemed awfully excited. Oh, and isn’t it a blessing that she didn’t get scarlet fever after all!”
“It’s something about the Hope-Scott Shield, I expect,” answered her cousin. “It’s sure to be, isn’t it? Her father’s told her something. Perhaps——” The clanging of the prayer-bell made further conversation impossible, and the expectant girls had to contain their souls in patience until the evening.
“And now, what is it?” demanded Josy, waving her comb and addressing the returned exile excitedly. Half-past eight had struck; the four were in their respective cubicles with the curtains drawn back, and in half an hour the light would be extinguished. “Let’s hear what you said you’d tell us.”
“You remember the ‘Little House’?” asked Stella, her eyes glistening. “Well, it’s about that!”
“Go on!” cried everybody in unison, and Margot’s eagerness was such that her brush flew from her hand to the opposite side of the dormitory. Since the beginning of the quarantine, and her view of the outside of the “Little House” ten days ago, she had felt the most intense desire to know more about the strange inmate whom Stella had already described as being a “miser, and quite alone, and most likely mad!” Quixotic plans had formed themselves over and over again in her mind, only to be laid aside one after another as she had realized that it would be impossible to carry out any of them, and at the same time to keep the Cliff School rules.
“All right,” and Stella’s voice grew lower in the intensity of her interest in the story she had to tell. “You know I told you that I’d never seen him—the old man, I mean. Well, on Saturday I was out driving with Jim, the boy; we were coming back from the station where we’d taken dad—he’d gone away for the Sunday to preach somewhere, you know—and suddenly, in the dark, the pony gave a kind of shy, and when Jim pulled him up and spoke to him, there was an old, old man standing in the road!”
“I say—was it him?” inquired Josy. “What on earth did he want, and how did you know him if you’d never seen him before?”
“I’m coming to that,” declared Stella, “if only you’ll listen. When Jim pulled the pony up the old, old man came straight to me and put his hand on my arm.”
An excited shiver shook all the three listening girls.
“And he said in quite a quiet, respectful kind of voice, you know: ‘Excuse me, miss, but I thought the parson might be driving, and I’d be glad of a word with him.’”