Her brother looked at her in wide-eyed amazement, then burst into a laugh. Indignantly Gwyn drew him through an open door, out upon a deserted porch.
“What do you mean by such an ill-mannered explosion?” she inquired wrath fully.
Harold became very sober. “Sis,” he said, “are you in dead earnest? Has that girl been telling any such yarn about her family?”
“Why no,” Gwyn had to confess, “she didn’t tell it, but——”
Again the boy laughed: “That’s too good to keep. I’ll have to tell the fellows. Old Hank Peters, the chap who has danced with her so much, comes from her part of the globe—Chicago, to be accurate, and he said that her father made his pile raising pigs—and they aren’t English at all. They are Swedes.”
Gwynette was angry with herself and everyone else. “Don’t you dare to tell; not a single soul!” she flared. “If you do, I’ll get even with you some time, some way.”
The boy, suddenly serious, took his sister’s hand. “Gwyn,” he said, “I have no desire to make this a joking matter with the fellows. Of course I’ll keep it dark, but I do hope it will teach you a lesson.”
Beulah and Pat wondered at Gwynette’s altered manner toward the guest of honor, but, not even to them did she confide the humiliating information she had received.
On the ride back to the seminary in the bus Gwyn had very little to say and the others attributed it to weariness.
Gwynette noticed a merry twinkle in the blue eyes of Clare Tasselwood when she effusively bade the three hostesses good-night, assuring them that she had spent a most delightful evening. Gwyn went sulkily to her room almost sure that the daughter of that pig-raising Westerner had known all along why the party had been given. She had indeed learned a lesson she decided as she closed her room door far less gently than she should have done at that hour of night. Before retiring she assured herself that even if she found out who really was the daughter of a younger son of English nobility, she wouldn’t put herself out to as much as speak to her.