“The first time that Aunt Adeline brought her home with her. Miss Hilliard used to look after her the first two or three vacations. You weren’t with her all the time, though, were you, Janet?”
“Just part of the time. She had my old nurse that took care of me while Grandmother was sick, and we’d go to the seashore, or somewhere in the mountains. But Miss Hilliard kept an eye on me. I never can pay her back, or your Aunt Adeline either.”
“You’ll never need to. Just having you in the family is enough. But won’t it be wonderful to have some kin folks? Tell us about it, Janet.”
Janet then handed the girls the books and read them the letters, pledging them again to secrecy, for she did not want to have the fifty girls talking over her private affairs. Like Janet, her friends were more interested in the surprising facts which she had to tell than in the good things in the box, though when she showed them the cake with its white frosting and unwrapped the pieces of chicken from the oiled paper, offering them their choice, there were some exclamations of pleasure. “That is a family worth having!” said Allie May. “No, Janet, I’d rather eat a good dinner and then when I am starved as usual after studying come to your feast.”
“Whom are you going to invite, Janet?”
“I want to take something to your aunt, Lina, and to Miss Hilliard, and do you think it would be very piggy just to have this by ourselves? Some way, I don’t want anybody much right now, and I just had a party of our crowd last Saturday, you know.”
“Suits me,” laughed Allie May.
“It wouldn’t be ‘piggy’ at all, Janet,” asserted Lina. “I know how you must feel,—sort of dazed, aren’t you?”
Janet nodded assent. “I’ll let you know when, after I talk to Miss Hilliard. I am to see her after dinner.”
But when Janet asked Miss Hilliard she was asked in turn if she had ever attended a late feast in the school. To this question Janet gave an honest reply. “Why, yes, Miss Hilliard.”