“She’s a splendid contrast to Jack, isn’t she?” concluded Gloria, as the hikers halted at Van Winkle’s Spring. Then Old Rip entertained most royally.
CHAPTER VI
SMOLDERING FIRES
“Altmount” was so named from the fact that the Alton family had settled, built and managed the mount for more than four generations. The original homestead was now the smallest of the three imposing structures that clung to the hillsides, and was used to house the youngest pupils of the select school, while in a splendid stone and shingle structure recently built, and unquestionably an important executive building for the seminary proper, were domiciled Gloria and Trixy.
Gloria might have been relegated to No. 2 known as the Wigwam, from a curious Indian legend attached to it, but somehow the influential Trixy succeeded in keeping her friend with her. Not quite sixteen, country life and natural fondness for healthy exercise had developed Gloria into the attractive personality termed “wholesome,” but comparing this with the uncertain ages and equally uncertain types about her, very often the “sweet sixteen” was mistaken for seventeen or even greater “teens.”
Now, Pat was seventeen, and she might have been classed among the “little ones.” She was small, round, dimplely and “bubblely.” It would be hard to imagine Pat ever supporting with dignity her real title, Patricia Halliday. Jean Engle was tall and willowy, and wore brown braids in a coronet about her head. She had rather a sharp tongue, and unfortunately her friends laughed at “her cuts.” The comparative isolation of boarding school naturally drew out and magnified each girl’s peculiar traits, so that what might have seemed rude in Jean at home was hailed as “good fun” at Altmount.
It was she who suddenly checked Gloria’s laughter. The departure of Jack had not yet ceased to be a subject for gossip, when a group of the girls were squatted around the Sentinel Pine, the only one tree upon the spacious grounds allowed to foster from year to year the carpet of pine needles about its roots. These were not raked up because they formed so splendid a little rest ground for the fortunate girls who “got there first.”
“You’re not a bit like your cousin,” announced Jean out of a clear sky, favoring Gloria with a critical look at the same moment.
“You mean Hazel?” floundered Gloria, sensing objection in Jean’s pert remark.
“Of course. Hazel seems so—oh, so sort of—well——”