“Hullo, you two!” Nita Anderson greeted them. “We thought you had succumbed to the mingled effects of bathing and ice-cream. And then an awestruck junior reported that you had gone to Miss Dampier’s room. Anything wrong?”
“Pretty awfully wrong—for us,” Jo said. “We’ve got to leave school!”
“Oh—twinses!” Helen Forester’s voice was a cry of distress. She crossed the room quickly, putting an arm round each. “Not—not your mother?”
“Oh, no. Mother’s all right,” Jean answered “It’s just horrid old money.” Her face was flushed, but she kept her head up, looking bravely at the concerned faces round her. “Father’s been awfully hard hit by the drought—he kept things from us as long as ever he could, hoping they’d pull round, and they haven’t. The stock haven’t anything to eat, and he’s buying feed.”
She stopped, on the verge of further revelations. Suddenly she realized that her father would not like her to speak of the friend to whom he had lent money, and who had failed to return it.
“Got to cut down expenses.” Jo took up the story. “School-bills are simply awful, of course, ’specially for people as fond of ices as we are! House-expenses, too—we’re going to be cooks and bottlewashers, and teach Billy in the intervals. Billy doesn’t respect us at all, so I don’t know how that’s going to answer. But we shan’t have a dull moment.”
She stopped abruptly: so far she had rattled on, but she knew that her voice would not carry her much farther. She was desperately afraid of pity. But no one pitied them.
“Well, you are bricks!” Helen said, cheerily. “Such a chance: we always talk, or think, about doing things for our people, but it generally ends in their doing everything for us, in the same old way. Now you two are really going to do things. You’ll have no end of fun.”
Her eyes sought Ellen Webster’s, saying silently, “Back me up!” Ellen responded promptly.
“Woe is me!” she said, dismally. “Here are you off to Ceylon, Helen, and all the others to frivol or be artistic, and who is going to support me? I’d depended on the twinses. They were going to be kept under my eagle eye and gradually hatched into the perfect prefect! Now they’ll be fully-fledged housekeepers, and they’ll look down on me as a little schoolgirl. It isn’t fair!”