CHAPTER X
DANGER AHEAD
“This is Wayland Hall, is it not?” The driver of the head automobile had now sprung from the roadster and was advancing toward the veranda steps. She was a tall girl, gracefully slender in her smart tan motor coat, with straight, well-cut features and large flashing dark eyes. From under her small tan motor hat her hair showed jet-black and silky, contrasting sharply with the healthy pallor of her oval face. Her tone, indifferently impersonal, was such as she might have used in addressing a traffic officer, or other guardian of public service.
“Good evening. Yes, this is Wayland Hall,” Vera’s courteous intonation contrasted sharply with the stranger’s almost imperious manner of speaking.
“Thank you.” The girl in tan turned abruptly away from the steps and hurried back to the roadster. She paused at one of the tonneau doors for an instant’s conversation with the, as yet unseen, occupant within the car, then went on to the next car where she paused again for a word with its driver.
“What shall we do, flee, or make a stand and greet our little freshie sisters?” Vera murmured.
“You have me there.” Leila cast a comically apprehensive glance toward the line of cars, now stretching most of the way down the drive. “It is one thing to welcome a freshie at the station, but quite another to extend the hand of welcome from the veranda. And, if the other eleven should prove like this first haughty lady, with the flashing black eyes and an imperial air, there will be little need of our kind offices,” Leila ended a trifle satirically.
“You got it, did you? So did I,” Leslie said half grimly. “I hate to hang out on the veranda and run the risk of being classed as a mutt by this freshie legion. Somehow, I feel something like that coming our way. On the other hand, we’re P. G’s., trying to live up to Hamilton’s first tradition. Let’s stick it out, and see what happens.”
“I’ll go and tell Miss Remson they’ve arrived. I’ll be back in a minute.” Vera flitted into the house to find Miss Remson.
From the head car an elderly woman, white-haired and smartly dressed, had now emerged. Immediately she began to busy herself with a goodly quantity of luggage which she began removing, piece by piece, from the back of the car. Leslie watched her shrewdly, for a moment, then muttered to Leila, “She’s the chaperon, on the order of Gaylord, you know. Wait and see if I haven’t said it.”