Emma came bouncing forward.
"I say," she began to me, "if it's true you're to sleep in our room I hope you understand you must do what I tell you. I'm the eldest. You're not to back up Harriet to disobey me."
"No," I said. "I don't want to do anything like that."
"Well, then," said Harriet, "you'll be Emma's friend, not mine."
My face fell, and I suppose Harriet saw it. She came closer to me and looked at me well, as if expecting me to answer. But for the first time since I had been in my new surroundings I felt more than bewildered—I felt frightened and lonely, terribly lonely.
"Oh, mamma," I thought to myself, "I wish I could see you to tell you about it. It isn't a bit like what I thought it would be."
But I said nothing aloud. I think now that if I had burst out crying it would have been better for me, but I had very little power of expressing myself, and Haddie had instilled into me a great horror of being a cry-baby at school.
In their rough way, however, several of the girls were kind-hearted, the two Smiths perhaps as much so as any. Harriet came close up to me.
"I'm only in fun," she said; "of course we'll be friends. I'll tell you how we'll do," and she put her fat little arm round me in a protecting way which I much appreciated. "Come over here," she went on in a lower voice, "where none of the big ones can hear what we say," and she drew me, nothing loth, to the opposite corner of the room.
As we passed through the group of older girls standing about, one or two fragments of their talk reached my ears.