Rosamond glanced at her wrist-watch as she exclaimed: “Here it is five minutes to the last bell. I never knew Adele to be so late before. What can have happened?”
“If Adele is late to-day,” said Doris Drexel, “it will break her perfect record. She hasn’t even been tardy a moment this whole term.”
“Ho! Here she comes now!” cried Peggy Pierce with a sigh of relief, for the girls would have been as sorry as Adele herself if the perfect record had been broken.
“What ever kept you so long, Della?” Rosamond called. “We’ve been waiting here for almost fifteen minutes.”
“Did you break a shoe-lace?” Doris Drexel inquired.
“Nary a bit of it,” laughed Adele when she could get her breath. “I happened to see a clump of violets in a sunny corner and I dug them up, roots and all, and took them over to Granny Dorset. She told me last week that she was eager for the first violets to bloom; that somehow the ache in her bones got better then, and since she can’t leave her bed to get them for herself, I thought that I would take them to her, and she was so pleased! I wish you might have seen her dear old eyes twinkle.”
“Oh, Adele, you’re always thinking of kind things to do,” Betty Burd declared. “I wish I were that way!”
“There’s the last bell!” called Peggy Pierce. “Forward! March!” But Adele detained them, exclaiming: “Wait, girls; I have the most beau-ti-ful secret to tell you, but I’ll have to keep it now until after school! Meet me under the elm-tree just as soon as ever you can.”
Then into their class-room they went, but all through the morning session they kept wondering and wondering what new fun Adele was planning. In fact, Betty Burd was thinking so much about it that she could not keep her mind on her lesson, and when Miss Donovan suddenly asked her to name the capital of England, Betty was so confused that she answered, “Oh, it’s a secret!”
“A secret?” exclaimed the mystified Miss Donovan. Poor Betty blushed as crimson as a poppy, and the other six girls just had to laugh.