“It doesn’t go without saying at all,” remarked Olive. “The Specialities, as you know quite well, girls, have to stand certain tests.”
“It is my opinion,” said Susie, “that we are all getting too high and mighty for anything. Perhaps the Vivians will teach us to know our own places.”
CHAPTER III
GOING SOUTH
It was a rough stone house, quite bare, only one story high, and without a tree growing anywhere near it. It stood on the edge of a vast Scotch moor, and looked over acres and acres of purple heather—acres so extensive that the whole country seemed at that time of year to be covered with a sort of mantle of pinky, pearly gold, something between the violet and the saffron tones of a summer sunset.
Three girls were seated on a little stone bench outside the lonely, neglected-looking house. They were roughly and plainly dressed. They wore frocks of the coarsest Scotch tweed; and Scotch tweed, when it is black, can look very coarse, indeed. They clung close together—a desolate-looking group—Betty, the eldest, in the middle; Sylvia pressing up to her at one side; Hetty, with her small, cold hand locked in her sister’s, on the other.
“I wonder when Uncle John will come,” was Hetty’s remark after a pause. “Jean says we are on no account to travel alone; so, if he doesn’t come to-night, we mayn’t ever reach that fine school after all.”
“I am not going to tell him about the packet. I have quite made up my mind on that point,” said Betty, dropping her voice.