So now Miss Arbuckle, after a moment of hesitation, motioned Billie into the study room, and, crossing over to one of the windows, stood looking out, tapping with her fingers on the sill.
“I’ve lost something, Billie,” she said, without looking around. “It may not seem much to you or to anybody else. But for me—well, I’d rather have lost my right hand.”
She looked around then, and Billie saw fresh moisture in her eyes.
“What is it?” she asked gently. “Perhaps I—we can help you find it.”
“I wish you could,” said Miss Arbuckle, with a little sigh. “But that would be too good to be true. It was only an old family album, Billie. But there were pictures in it that I prize above everything I own. Oh, well,” she gave a little shrug of her shoulders as if to end the matter. “I’ll get over it. I’ve had to get over worse things. But,” she smiled and patted Billie’s shoulder fondly, “I didn’t mean to burden your young shoulders with my troubles. Just run along and forget all about it.”
Billie did run along, but she most certainly did not “forget all about it.”
“Funny thing to get so upset about,” she said to herself, as she slowly climbed the steps to her dormitory. “A picture album! I don’t believe I’d ever get my nose and eyes all red over one. Just the same, I’d like to find it and give it back to her. Good Miss Arbuckle! After the Dill Pickles, she seems like an angel.”
She was still smiling over the thought of what had happened to the Dill Pickles when she opened the door of the dormitory and came upon her chums.
Laura and Vi and a dark-haired, pink-cheeked girl were sitting on one of the beds in one corner of the dormitory, alternately talking and gazing dreamily out of the window to Lake Molata, where it gleamed and shimmered in the morning sunlight at the end of a sloping lawn.
The dark-haired, pink-cheeked girl was Rose Belser. Rose Belser, being jealous of Billie’s immense popularity at Three Towers Hall the term before, had done her best to get the new girl into trouble, only to be won over to Billie’s side in the end. Now she was as firm a friend of Billie’s as any girl in Three Towers Hall.