Thus urged, Alma "wiggled" accordingly; and while she carefully washed her tear-stained face, and put up her hair, their visitor, sprawling across the bed, kept up a running fire of ridiculous remarks, all uttered in her peculiar, dry, drawling voice, and punctuated with the oddest facial contortions. Yet, in spite of her nonsense, there was very evidently a good deal of real sense, and the kindest feeling behind it, and her singular face, too unusual to be called either plain or pretty, beamed with satisfaction when she had won a genuine peal of laughter from the two dejected Prescotts.
"We'd better go down now. To-night of course everything is more or less topsy-turvy. My trunk, I think, must be still out in Kokomo, Indiana, or some such place. I don't even expect to see it for another month or so. But I don't mind. I'm a regular child of nature anyway—it's just Amelia who's pernickety about our appearing in full regalia every night for dinner. Amelia is Leland, of course. She's tremendously keen on preserving a refining influence about the school, and I think she looks on me as a rather demoralizing factor. There goes the gong."
The three went down-stairs together, Charlotte linking herself between Nancy and Alma.
As if by magic, the din of a few moments before had been lulled. The fifty or sixty girls had gathered in the large reception room, where a wood-fire was blazing up a huge stone chimney, and where Miss Leland, wearing a dignified black evening dress, was seated in a pontifical chair, chatting with eight or ten of her charges, with the air of a gracious hostess. All the voices had sunk to a lower key.
"Is everyone here?" She looked about her, and closing the book she had been toying with led the way into the dining-room beyond, where the ten or twelve small tables, with their snowy covers, and softly shaded candles gave the room more the appearance of a quiet restaurant than the ordinary school refectory.
Charlotte Spencer sat with Nancy at a table near Miss Leland's; while Alma found herself separated from her sister, and relegated to another table where she was completely marooned among five strange girls.
Charlotte introduced Nancy to a sallow maiden with prominent front teeth, named Allison Maitland, to a statuesque brunette named Katherine Leonard——
"The school beauty," was her brief comment. "And this is Denise Lloyd, sister of Mildred, my roommate. Hope we have soup."
"Are you any relation to Lawrence Prescott, who goes to Williams?" asked the beautiful Katherine, turning to Nancy with a slightly patronizing air. Nancy vaguely disclaimed a kinship that might have won her Miss Leonard's interest, and thereby quickly lost some of it.
"No, she's not, she says," said Charlotte. "Is he a beau of yours? 'Yes,' replied the girl, a soft blush mantling her damask cheek. 'Naturally he's a beau of mine. Who isn't?' and with this keen retort, she again lost herself in her maiden meditations. But I'll tell you who she is a relation of—she's the thirty-second cousin once removed of 'Prescott's Conquest of Peru'—aren't you, Nancy?"