“Do you think,” she asked finally, “that my mother could have been such a dreadful person? I do not think I ever saw a lovelier face than her picture in my father’s watch.”
Miss Winthrop looked closely at Olive, remembering how her strange and foreign beauty had always interested her. “No, my dear, your mother could most certainly not have been dreadful,” she answered. “I think I heard that she was a Spanish girl and these curios you have and your own appearance make me feel assured of the fact. It was because your grandmother was informed that your mother was a singer or an actress, that she felt so deep a prejudice against her. But the real truth is that she never forgave her son and wished never to hear his name mentioned as long as she lived.”
With a little shiver at the thought of such a nature as the old woman’s at “The Towers,” Olive went on up to her own room to bed.
CHAPTER XXI
JEAN AND FRIEDA RETURN TO PRIMROSE HALL
In less than forty-eight hours after the close of the last chapter Primrose Hall was once more emptied of its silences and loneliness and gay with the returning of its students now that the holiday season was well past.
Most of the girls came back in groups of twos and threes, since trains at Tarrydale were numerous, but every now and then the school carryall would be loaded up with girls, hanging on to the steps, sitting in one another’s laps. And it happened that in one of these overloaded parties Jean and Frieda arrived at Primrose Hall together.
There was so much excitement, of course, in the arrival of such a number of students at one time and so much kissing and embracing among some of the girls tragically separated from their best chums for two weeks, that in the general hubbub Jean and Frieda noticed no special change in Olive. If Jean thought at first that she had looked a little tired she forgot about it in a few minutes. The girls had so many stories to tell of their own experiences, there was so much running back and forth from one room to the other, so much unpacking of trunks and bestowing of forgotten gifts, that the three ranch girls really saw very little of each other without outside friends being present until almost bedtime that night.
Then at nine o’clock, with only an hour to spare before their lights were turned out, they met before their sitting-room fire, wearing their kimonos, their hair down their backs, prepared at last for the confidential talk to which for different reasons they had all been looking forward for some time.
A sign with “No Admittance” printed on it hung outside their door and on the floor in convenient reach of the three girls sat two large boxes of candy, one presented to Frieda upon leaving Richmond, Va., and the other a farewell gift to Jean from Cecil Belknap in New York.
For the first moment so great was the satisfaction of the three girls at being reunited that nobody spoke, and then all at once they began talking in chorus.