There were tears in Daisy"s eyes.
Helen gave a vague smile.
"I can see now that it was somewhat due to Roxy"s influence. She kept saying you were so bewitched about her, and that you were on the lookout for new sensations, that you tried on friendships and then cast them off. I think that was what _she_ did. What a foolishly miserable girl I was, but I _did_ love you. And I do, I shall."
Helen kissed her fondly.
"And mamma thought it was very kind in you to take up Miss Craven. She is curiously interested in her, wondering how she will develop. Papa says the Craven mines are remarkable, the new one with all that hemat.i.te is a fortune by itself. I hope she comes back."
That evening they made acquaintance with a few of the new girls. And the next day came a crowd, new and old, Miss Craven among them.
Juliet Craven had changed wonderfully under the influence of a woman who had always longed for a daughter and had three sons instead. There was a brightness about her, a kind of new interest that shone in her eyes and brought a tint to her cheeks. A little contrast would have made her quite a pretty girl, for her features were fairly good, but she was too much of a nondescript.
For the first time she had known personal interest and affection from a woman who might have been her mother, and who certainly had no ulterior object. She had outgrown some of her timidity, she stood up straighter, as if she was more conscious of her own power, and she dared to meet the eyes of the other girls, to answer their smiles. She was to go in most of the cla.s.ses this year, though the girls would be much younger, but Mrs. Aldred judged that the companionship would prove beneficial.
There were several changes in the teaching corps. A Mrs. Wiley, middle-aged and experienced, who had been employed in a girls" college in the West, shared with Miss Grace the duties of the senior cla.s.ses.
Her daughter, Miss Esther, taught in the younger day-school cla.s.ses and was a pupil in several studies. After a month matters ran along smoothly.
Not that the girls fell into the traces without any friction. Some were pert and self-sufficient, others consequential, and several not remarkable for anything, taking mental culture along objective lines, and a few ambitious, intellectual, loving study for the sake of the sweet kernel knowledge when you had cracked the rough outer sh.e.l.l. There were the bright and sweet, who had no aims above the average, and who would get trained into nice, wholesome girls and make good wives and mothers.
Helen enjoyed her studies immensely. The botany rambles were one of her great pleasures, and when she went at the wonders of astronomy she was enraptured.
"Such a student is worth having; she inspires the rest," Mrs. Wiley said to Mrs. Aldred. "There is a girl who should go to college."
"Yes, she ought," but in her secret soul Mrs. Aldred feared that was not Mrs. Van Dorn"s design.
She was beginning to understand and love Latin, and doing very well at French. She did not display much apt.i.tude for drawing, though she had a certain artistic taste in arrangement.
"But I really do not see any use of hammering away at music," she protested. "I never shall make a fine player."
"You will make a fine singer and you want some thorough knowledge for that," said Madame Meran.
"It was one of the branches Mrs. Van Dorn is very particular about,"
Mrs. Aldred added, in a tone that left no room for demur.
There was the usual fun and perhaps a little sly flirting among the newer students with the young men in the law offices. Autumn was quite a lively time, since court was in session. The girls were allowed to visit the fairs and entertainments of their respective churches, and occasionally spend Sat.u.r.day afternoon with an outside acquaintance.
During the holidays Mrs. Dayton wrote that one of the High-School teachers had resigned and Mr. Warfield had gained the appointment, being much delighted with it, and would board with her. From home she heard that Jenny had a little son and they were all very joyous. Fan was going to spend the winter with her. Aurelia had been taken out of school as she didn"t learn anything worth while, and Aunt Jane believed in making her girls useful.
"I don"t wonder teachers get discouraged in a small country place," she thought, "when the parents care so little for education." She was glad Mr. Warfield had gone to the High School, where he could have a more congenial atmosphere.
Helen often wondered in these days what her father had been like, and how he came to drift to such a dull place as Hope Center. Twenty years before it had been a center of several things. The Church was flourishing. In the winter the large boys and girls came to school and the old-fashioned alligation, mensuration, and surveying were taught and made useful, the history of the country, parsing out of Milton"s Paradise Lost, learning as much about the older English essayists and writers as was taught in the High School.
Now, the children, before they were fairly grown, went into shops or learned a trade. There had been a fine debating society in the Center, and people drove in from miles around to listen to the arguments, which were generally on stirring questions of the day, psychological fads being unknown, or the highest truth in them called by some other name.
Then the railroad had really cut it off. North Hope had grown at its expense.
She thought, too, not a little about her own future. What would happen at the close of the school year. At the first of January she and Daisy Bell and a Miss Gardiner went into Senior B. In another year she would graduate.
There was something in Mrs. Van Dorn"s letters that appealed to her deeply at times, an interest that gave her a curious thrill. She wrote more earnestly herself, she realized what a great thing this had been to her, lifting her out of the common groove and giving her a decided standing among Hope people. And, oh! it had afforded her such splendid experiences with cultured people, some friends who might go a long way through life with her and enrich her path with their life.
"If you were going to college, I should want to go too," Daisy Bell said one day. "Papa would be delighted, I am sure. And though you are younger, I do not know so very much more," laughingly. "You always study in such desperate earnest. We should keep step together. Oh, don"t you wish we could see into the future?"
Yes, she really did.
Her friendship with Juliet Craven touched another side of her nature.
Miss Craven had a vein of peculiar romance. She improvised in music, she could imitate bird-songs in rare melody, she could go to depths of feeling in a few chords that stirred one"s very soul. It was absolute genius.
"These are the things I used to sing to myself in the old home," she would say. "Sometimes I would put words to them."
"Why, that would be poetry. Why don"t you try to write them down?" Helen inquired with newborn interest.
"There are so many things to study, to learn, to do. I am not pretty enough to attract people, but of course, I know the money would.
Sometimes I wish I had only just enough for my own wants. Another year I shall come into actual possession of a large sum, and three years later, if the mines should be sold, there will be--well, I haven"t any idea how much more. Mrs. Davis" plan is to take me abroad and find someone with a t.i.tle to marry me. What could I do in that kind of life? I want something quiet, far-reaching. I should like to make unfortunate people happy. I wonder if there are any young girls in the world as lonely and as unfortunate as I was! I shudder when I think I might have gone on with grandfather until all the best years of my life were spent. Mrs.
Howard advises me to stay here and get a thorough education, and I think that is best."
Helen was very decided in her opinion that it was by far the best. How queer that money should be so unequally divided, Miss Craven having so much more than she could use, Mrs. Van Dorn having so much, and some of the girls with such rich fathers, then others just squeezing through, she really having none at all.
Mrs. Van Dorn was doing just what Miss Craven longed to do. No, not _just_. If Helen had been unpromising she realized keenly that she might have gone back to Uncle Jason, or worked her way through the High School as she best might. She knew now, most girls of sixteen do, that an attractive face and manner was an excellent capital. She sometimes gave herself a little mental hug at the thought of having just the right share of good looks, enough to please, and not enough to be vain of, and not the sort of fascination Roxy Mays had possessed. There were several beautiful girls in school. Daisy Bell had many charms, a lovely, subtle, easily-flushing complexion that was like pink and pearl, beautiful even teeth, tender and loving eyes.
"My face is just like me," she comforted herself, looking in the gla.s.s.
"It is strong, earnest, and capable. And I do mean to do something with life before I die. I hope G.o.d will put me in the way of it."
Toward spring there was an episode that now and then happens in a girls"
school in spite of the closest supervision. Mrs. Aldred tried to train the girls to a high sense of honor, and allowed them a certain liberty, though no one girl ever went out alone. Among the new scholars was a pretty, saucy little thing, bright with her lessons and full of fun, seemingly innocent enough. But she had adroitly managed a flirtation with the brother of one of the day scholars. Letters had pa.s.sed between them, and she had eluded supervision and taken several strolls with him by climbing over the fence at the back of the grounds, with the a.s.sistance of her admirer. The daring went a little too far, and one evening Miss Wiley saw the return of the culprit, who begged and pleaded a little at first, and then became defiant.
"I don"t care," she said angrily. "We are engaged. I knew I wouldn"t be allowed to see him alone if he called, and I had a right to his visits."
Mrs. Aldred was surprised and had a rather stormy time with the girl, who was sent home at once.
"Now that Roxy Mays will never come back," said Daisy gravely, "I will say to you that she did go as far as the letters once. It was with the clerk in Adams" drug store. He gave a note to me and said it was a prescription, and she laughed about it, saying she only did it to prove how easily a girl could write letters and get answers, but that she was not going to follow it up, and she knew I would not betray her. It was the very week before school closed, and though it wasn"t just right I let it pa.s.s. She still corresponds with him, but now her mother must know it. It doesn"t seem real fun to me to break rules that way. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she had returned to school!"
Helen smiled, thinking of her innocent letter to Mr. Warfield. And now Mrs. Dayton quoted him so often she wondered if that was quite right.
But she did enjoy writing to Mrs. Van Dorn. Often there was only a few lines from her, the rest finished by Miss Gage, who had a very methodical manner of going over their doings.
In April an announcement was made that surprised and troubled many of the scholars. Mrs. Aldred had decided to go to Europe, taking her daughter Grace and chaperoning several other young ladies. Gertrude, who had been studying hard in Paris, would join them, and they would spend the ensuing winter in Rome. Mrs. Wiley and her daughter would take the school, keeping it on the same lines.
"I wish you could remain another year and graduate," she said to Helen.
"I shall write to Mrs. Van Dorn about it. Then you would be fitted for whatever might happen afterward."
"Oh, thank you!" Helen replied earnestly. "I have been troubled about it, and thought I ought to inquire. I should be so sorry to have my schooldays end. I have been so happy here."
No one could doubt it to look at her radiant face. Mrs. Aldred was much gratified.
Yes, she should hate to part with Daisy now that they were growing so dear to each other. And she felt as if she wanted a life interest in Miss Craven, to know the sort of woman she would make and what she would do with her fortune.
It was May when the reply came, a reply that so astounded Helen, even after reading the letter over two or three times, that she was still bewildered. She took it to Mrs. Aldred.