There, all alone, stood a girl dressed in dark blue whose red-brown hair was neatly fastened at her neck. With hands idly clasped in front of her, she watched the boats plying up and down the great river, and, oh, the loneliness, the bleak, grey loneliness in the heart of the girl.
Without a glance at the curious group at the other end of the sun porch, she soon turned and went within.
“Well, I confess democracy is carried rather far in this particular instance,” the plump, good-natured Gladys Goodsell remarked. “Not that I care greatly. We do not have to associate with her, whoever she is, unless we so desire.”
“Doesn’t anyone know who she is?” Catherine Lambert inquired.
The questioner did not look at the French girl, nor would she have been able to interpret the meaning of the slight sneer that appeared on the dark, handsome face for a fleeting second even if she had seen it.
Marianne had told no one that she had met Muriel the year before on Windy Island, and Muriel herself, though conscious of the presence of Marianne Carnot, was so numbed with grief that she cared little that she was being snubbed.
The coming of that “crude island girl” to this fashionable school had angered Marianne, but the memory of Gene’s very evident preference for Muriel’s companionship had aroused in the heart of the French girl a desire to make the other suffer, but she would bide her time.
“Is it true that she cannot speak the English language correctly?” The tone of the questioner was horrified in the extreme.
Faith Morley nodded, adding hastily (because her heart was kind): “But that in itself is not vital, for surely she can learn to speak correctly, but—but of course her family is rather impossible.”
“A lighthouse-keeper’s grand-daughter!” This from Adelaine Stuart, whose family tree was always shown to each new pupil at High Cliff, if she chanced to be one whom Adelaine wished to impress. That her father was imprisoned for having robbed widows and orphans with his wildcat schemes she did not tell.