“I thought we could walk down toward the bluff together, because we go the same way,” suggested Kit. “How do you like it here?”
“I like it,” responded Jeannette slowly, with a certain dignified shyness that was characteristic of her. “My mother has told me all about it. She liked the library when she was here. She told me where her room was upstairs, too, but I didn’t want to go up while the girls were there.”
“Let’s go up now, while they’re all downstairs,” Kit said impulsively. “I’ll take you. Which dorm was she in?”
“Her name was Mary Douglas. It’s the Douglas Dormitory. Her father was one of the founders here, Malcolm Douglas.”
Kit listened in utter amazement and with a rising sense of joy. Here was Jeannette Flambeau, flouted and disdained by the little crowd of girls who happened to live in a certain district of Delphi, but claiming her grandfather was a founder of the college. At that very moment Kit planned her surprise on the girls.
As they walked through the hall together, Georgia and the others followed them with their glances and smiled. The two paused before a big bronze tablet with the name of the founders on it. There it was, third from the last, Malcolm Douglas.
“He came from Canada,” said Jeannette, “and settled here. Later on he went into Minnesota, and on into Dakota. The family was very poor after he died, but my mother came here for two years, and even when I was a little girl, seven or eight years old, before she died, she used to tell me how she loved it, and that I must come here, too.”
“Don’t any of your brothers want to come? They’re all older than you, aren’t they.”
Jeannette shook her head and smiled curiously. “They are all Flambeau, every one. They eat, and sleep and fish, that’s all.”
Kit led the way to the upper floor, where the dorms were, and meeting Virginia, she asked the way to the Douglas.