Isabel and Virginia scarcely knew whether to look with content and admiration at the minister and his daughter or to watch the lights of the city from the taxi windows, for it was late when the train pulled in. At last they reached the parsonage, where the whole family welcomed the girls with enthusiasm. Gordon and Tommy shook hands cordially and viewed the two guests with interest. Mary responded shyly to their greetings, June hugged them both, and Mrs. Lancaster gave both motherless girls a warm, motherly embrace. Hilary took them upstairs at once to the guest room. “This will be your room, unless some bishop or district superintendent comes unexpectedly, and then you will have June’s and mine.”
“And what will you do, then?”
“O, we’ll just hang up on the wall somewhere as usual, won’t we, June?”
June was afraid that Hilary’s remark would be taken seriously and said, “We can sleep on the davenport or up in the attic.”
Isabel and Virginia laughed and Isabel said, “You are very accommodating, then.”
“A minister’s family has to be,” replied June.
“You might call our family life ‘adjustable,’” suggested Hilary, “but we love to have company.”
“We have cots and things, too,” said the serious little June. “It’s very easy for us to manage.”
When the girls came downstairs, Mrs. Lancaster had a warm lunch for them and the whole family, even Dr. Lancaster, sat around and listened to the chatter about school and the doings of the Greycliffers. This was started by a remark of Dr. Lancaster’s to Isabel: “Yours is the school, I believe, where they have little incidents like wrecks and fires.” The girls all laughed at this and started in with more vivid descriptions than they had dared write home for fear of worrying the home people. There was not much that was funny about the wreck of the Greycliff, but the fire was different. June fairly doubled up with laughter, and Gordon and Tommy, too, at Isabel’s graphic accounts of faculty costumes, the array of slippers left in the snow, and the funny things that different girls did under excitement.
“Which was the girl, Hilary,” asked Tommy, “that you wrote about, the one that picked up her fountain pen from the table as she passed and left her pocketbook with a lot of money in it?”