“But it is true,” protested the boy—“true as gospel, Dorothy. You are one of the finest little ladies in the land and no one will ever dispute it.”
“Oh, I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”
“Well, you got ’em just the same, didn’t you? And you deserve ’em.”
The train on which Dorothy and Jim, together with Ephraim, Aunt Betty’s colored man, were riding, was already speeding through the broad vales of Maryland, every moment bringing it nearer the city of Baltimore and Old Bellvieu, the ancestral home of the Calverts, where Mrs. Elisabeth Cecil Somerset-Calvert, familiarly termed, “Aunt Betty,” would be awaiting them.
Since being “taken into the fold” by Aunt Betty, after years of living with Mother Martha and Father John, to whom she had sent the child as a nameless foundling, Dorothy had, indeed, been a happy girl, as her experiences related in the previous volumes of this series, “House Party,” “In California,” “[On a Ranch],” “House Boat,” and “At Oak Knowe,” will attest.
Just now she was returning from the Canadian school of Oak Knowe, where she had spent a happy winter. Mrs. Calvert had been unable to meet her in the Dominion, as she had intended, but had sent Jim and Ephraim, the latter insisting that he was needed to help care for his little mistress. Soon after the commencement exercises were over the trio had left for Dorothy’s home.
And such a commencement as it had been! Dorothy could still hear ringing in her ears the rather solemn, deep-toned words of the Bishop who conferred the diplomas and prizes, as he had said:
“To Miss Dorothy Calvert for uniform courtesy.” Then again: “To Miss Dorothy Calvert, for advancement in music.”
“The dear old Bishop!” she cried, aloud, as she thought again of the good times she had left behind her.