“There isn’t any help out of my trouble,” Gladys Merle sobbed afresh. “I’ve been a silly, that’s what! I told the girls that my father was stately and handsome, and he isn’t, he’s as backwoodsy as he can be, but he had no right to come to the school and humiliate me.”
“I saw your father,” Carol said, “and I liked his honest face and the merry twinkle in his kind blue eyes, and if you are better educated than he is, remember that it is your father to whom you owe it. My great-grandfather, Gladys, had a royal title offered to him by the king of England, but he refused it, saying that he would rather remain simply a minister of the gospel and a gentleman. There is a book down in the library called ‘The Making of Royalty,’ that tells all about it, and my name is in it as being the youngest member of the American branch of the family of Lorens. I was the youngest member then, but now there are the twins.”
Gladys Merle gasped. To think that she had been trying to snub a girl whose ancestor might have been royalty and wouldn’t.
An hour later the pupils of Linden Hall Seminary were amazed to see Gladys Merle Jones and Carol Lorens enter the dining-room together.
The next morning Gladys telephoned to Buffalo and asked her father if she might come up and spend the day with him.
Mr. Jones was overjoyed and decided that a headache had been the cause of the outburst of the day before.
After that the young ladies of Linden Hall heard no more about Gladys Merle’s great wealth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A WISH FULFILLED
A week, crowded with new and delightful experiences, had passed since Adele Doring and her friends had arrived at Linden Hall Seminary. The girls from Sunnyside were well started in their classes and having resolved to study earnestly, they spent much of their time with their books, but of course there were the recreation hours and the free time, and long rambles accompanied by the youngest teacher, Miss Merritt, and horseback rides down the beautiful wood roads with the riding-master, Mr. Haley.
One day when the girls were leaving their classes, Janet Nagel met them in the corridor and told them that Madame Deriby wished them to remain in the library for a while and come to her office one by one as their names would be called.