But just across the hall in a very small room, eighteen by number, little Miette lay with eyes wide open in the darkness. She was beginning to feel that the wonderful joys of school girl life might have their accompanying sorrows. Never, since her own dear mother had last kissed her good-night, had Miette felt that life held any further blessings for her, until she came to Glenwood. Then it seemed that the happy young girls and their unlimited resources for fun-making, would be something after all.
But now those other girls did not like her. She could see that plainly, and feel it keenly, in spite of what might be said and done by those who were kind and thoughtful.
“And what must I have done to so anger them?” she kept asking herself. “Certainly I said not a word, nor did I do anything—They must be strange, perhaps they know I—”
A shudder ran through the form that hid itself in the coverlets. “No, how could they know that? No one knew it, not even the kind, gentle Mrs. Pangborn!”
“And I might be so happy to forget it, too,” went on the girl’s thoughts. “If only it would never come back, and I might stay at this lovely place, even the rude girls would not worry me.”
Then she turned her eyes straight up in the darkness.
“Oh, Mother!” she breathed. “Hear Miette! Watch your Miette, and save her!”
But the dreaded specter of her past experiences would come up and haunt the child. She prayed and prayed, but somehow those girls in their nonsense brought back to her a taunt—the wound was not new, it was only deepened.
“But I must never tell,” she sighed, “not even dear, sweet Dorothy Dale!”