“‘Work, work, and then work some more,’ was a certain author’s rule for gaining success,” Bertha Angel told them. “Your ambition is a laudable one, my dear friend Adele, and I will lend you my assistance by hearing you recite your verbs.”
“‘It is better to fail than never to try,’” Carol laughingly added. “Doesn’t some one else know a suitable adage?”
“‘Failures are stepping-stones to success,’” Evelyn Dartmoor chimed in, and the cheerful expression in her beautiful face would have delighted her grandfather could he have seen it, but he knew from her letters that she was finding happiness in the companionship of Carol.
But when the contest took place, it was won, as Betty had prophesied, by Marie Le Clerc. Adele sincerely congratulated the winner and greatly admired the medal, which had come from France, and secretly determined to try again next year if she chanced to be at Linden Hall. Her own essay won second place and honorable mention in the school archives.
The next exciting event was the birthday of Gladys Merle Jones, who received a goodly check from her adoring father, and that maiden, wishing to share it with the others, obtained Madame Deriby’s permission to have a theater-party in Buffalo, to which she invited all the pupils and the faculty.
The request was granted, and the girls spent a wonderful afternoon in one of the most beautiful of theaters and returned bearing with them refreshments for an evening spread.
March came in wild and blustering, and with it a new pupil arrived at Linden Hall. She was of so unusual a type that she greatly interested the girls from Sunnyside.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE OLD-FASHIONED PUPIL
“Girls, did any of you see the new pupil?” Carol Lorens asked when the dwellers of Apple-Blossom Alley had gathered in Adele’s room one wild March afternoon.
“I haven’t seen her,” Doris Drexel replied, as she curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace where a log was snapping merrily. “What does she look like and where has she come from?”