"Diane Merelda," the girl said in a liquid tone.
"What?" Adelle asked with puckered brows.
"Di-ane Merel-da," came more slowly in the same soft tone. "See!" She took with a gracious movement the pencil from Adelle's hand and wrote on a piece of paper the name, and added beneath in small letters "F. de M."
"Oh," said Adelle, "what do those mean?" pointing to the letters beneath.
"Fille de Marie—a daughter of the Blessed Virgin," the girl translated sweetly.
Adelle looked at the stranger in bewilderment. She was a dainty person, as small as Adelle, but a perfectly formed young woman. Her black hair was tightly braided over her small head, in a fashion then strange, and her face was very pale, of a natural pallor emphasized by the line of carmine lips. Her eyes were black and wide. She smiled gently, contentedly, upon Adelle. Altogether she was an unusual phenomenon to the young American. She explained herself volubly if not fluently in broken English, pausing every now and then with a charming birdlike toss of her little black head and, "You say so, no?"—waiting for Adelle's nod to dash on into further intricacies of speech.
Miss Diane Merelda, as she told Adelle Clark, was the daughter of a wealthy Mexican whose acquaintance with Americans had so liberalized him that he preferred to educate his children in the States and in schools not under Catholic control. Señorita Diane had left her father's home in Morelos earlier than intended, however, because of the outbreak of an insurrection in the province, in which her father was concerned. As his haçienda near Morelos was not safe on account of brigands, Señor Merelda had sent his wife and daughter abroad to join his sons, and so Diane had reached Herndon Hall by the way of Madrid, Paris, and New York, after a summer spent with relatives in Spain. Her mother had learned of Herndon Hall from a chance traveling companion, and in some way had induced Miss Thompson to waive her strict requirements for admission.
From her way of dressing her hair to her pointed slippers and broken English, the little Mexican was even more markedly different from the Herndon type than Adelle, and though the older girls knew enough of the world to recognize a distinction in differences, Diane did not seem to. She was gracious to all, and Adelle happened to be the first girl she could speak to while she waited for her mother, who was closeted with Miss Thompson. Here was Adelle's chance, although she did not recognize it as such. They talked for an hour, rather Diane talked and Adelle did her best to understand the rapid, lisping, birdlike notes of the foreigner. She learned that Diane had a brother in a school near St. Louis, another in a technical college, and still another now in Germany. The Merelda family seemed much scattered, but that did not disturb the little Mexican.
"We shall all be back in Morelos sometime!" She added sweetly, "Perhaps you will come to Mexico with me, no?"
Adelle soon learned all about Madrid, the Spanish relatives, the sight of the young King of Spain at San Sebastian, the trip to Lourdes which the family had taken in hope that the holy cure might help her mother's lame knee, and too much else to relate here. Señorita Diane was exceedingly loquacious: her little tongue wove in and out of the new idiom with surprising facility, forever wagging in a low, sweet babble of nothings. Adelle, as has been sufficiently indicated, absorbed passively the small and the large facts of life. Diane was like a twittering bird on a tiny twig that shook with the vehemence of her expression. She reacted instinctively to every stimulus from a new toothbrush to the sight of a motor-car, and she preferred not to react alone. Thus Adelle did more talking of her blunt, bald kind to her new friend than she had accomplished hitherto all her life. She explained Herndon Hall literally to the stranger, while Diane exclaimed in three languages.