“I wonder who’ll invite Bob!” Peggy began, but before she could say more, Bertha interrupted, “Why, I shall, of course, since he is my brother.” So Peggy didn’t have a chance to tease Rose that time.
One day soon after the party announcement, Adele stole into the library where several of her friends were doing reference work. She kept looking around as though she feared that she might be followed and her movements were so stealthy that the girls, who were supposed to be studying, were much mystified.
“Adele, you act like the villain in a moving-picture play creeping along that way,” Betty Burd said. “It gives me the shudders. What are you afraid of?”
“I’ve a secret,” Adele said, “and I don’t want Gertrude to hear it. She doesn’t know that I know. In fact, she doesn’t know that anybody knows, but I do know, and——”
“My dear Adele,” Carol Lorens exclaimed, rising and pretending to feel her friend’s pulse and forehead, “you don’t think that you are ill or crazy or any little thing like that, do you?”
Adele laughed merrily. “No, I honestly don’t believe that I am any crazier than usual, but truly, I have a secret to tell you, and I wanted to be sure that Gertrude wasn’t in the room, that’s why I stole in so still like. I thought that you were so engrossed in your studies, as Miss Sharpleigh says, that you would neither hear nor see.”
“Gertrude is not with us,” Evelyn declared, and then she added gaily, “If you really want to know where she is at this very moment, you have but to glance out of yonder window.”
Adele looked and saw a tall lassie standing deep in the daisies with her flock of very little girls trooping about her, their arms filled with the gold and white blossoms, but she also saw more than that.
“Look! Look, girls!” she cried excitedly. “What if it should be a budding romance?”
“Where? Where?” Rosamond called as she rushed to the window, followed by the others, who peered over toward the daisy meadow which bordered the school grounds on the highway.