"I'm sure I don't know," said Billie, feeling a little nervous herself.

"For all we know," she added, with a chuckle, "we may look stuck up ourselves."

"Well, maybe we are," Laura giggled. "That's what Amanda is always calling us, you know."

"Oh, look," whispered Vi suddenly. "There's Rose Belser with one of the new girls. I wonder who she is."

The new girl in question was a nice looking, rather serious girl who wore gla.s.ses and looked to the girls--so they said later--as if she might really like to study. She was carrying a grip and had evidently just arrived.

While the girls watched, she and Rose turned and started in their direction. For a minute Billie could have sworn Rose did not mean to stop. However, she did stop, and rather reluctantly introduced the stranger to them.

"This is Caroline Brant," she said, adding as she turned to the strange girl with a queer little smile: "These are some of the new girls who are in our dorm, Caroline. Billie Bradley, Violet Farrington and Laura Jordon."

Caroline Brant shook hands and smiled a grave smile that seemed "just made to go with her gla.s.ses," Laura said afterward. When the girl had pa.s.sed on with Rose toward the stairway, the chums had a queer sense of comfort--as though they had found at least one good friend at Three Towers Hall.

Lunch came and went, and so absorbed were the girls in the fun and excitement of meeting new girls and listening to stories of good times had during the summer that dinner caught them before they knew it and they found that the day was gone.

Everybody went to bed early that night, for Miss Walters had sent around an order that all lights should be out by nine o'clock sharp. The next day the real work of the term was to begin, and she wanted all her girls bright and fresh for the start.

The next week would have been perfect for the girls, but for one thing.

They liked their cla.s.srooms, which occupied all the second and third floors, they liked their studies, and they loved most of their teachers--especially Miss Race, the mathematics teacher.

But they soon found that what Rose Belser and Connie Danvers had said about Miss Cora and Miss Ada Dill--the "Twin Dill Pickles," when n.o.body was around--was terribly and awfully true.

The Dill twins never seemed to miss an opportunity to make the girls feel bad. They were sarcastic in cla.s.s, and seemed to take real delight in hurting the feelings of their pupils whenever it was possible.

It was only a few days after the opening of the school year when Billie had her first little set-to with Miss Cora Dill. The latter had just finished calling the roll and had pushed the book from her. Then she looked sharply at Billie.

"Your name is Beatrice, is it not?" she asked in a tone as acid as her dill pickle nickname.

"Yes, Miss Dill," answered Billie, wondering nervously if there were anything wrong about her name and miserably conscious that the eyes of all the girls were upon her.

"But the girls call you 'Billie,' do they not?" asked Miss Cora.

"Yes," said Billie again.

"But 'Billie' is a boy's name," said Miss Cora tartly, boring Billie through with her black eyes. "And it is extremely unladylike for a girl to bear a boy's name. Extremely unladylike," she repeated, staring at poor Billie, who was as red as a beet and filled with a wild desire to run away and cry.

She might have done it, too, at least the crying part, but a t.i.tter from one of the girls in the back of the room saved her. She was no longer afraid, only angry--horribly angry.

So she just looked up in thin-lipped Miss Cora's face and said very quietly: "I never thought about my name being unladylike, Miss Cora, and I'm sure it hasn't made any difference with me. Mother says that it is the way one acts that counts."

"Well, see that you take care of your actions," retorted Miss Dill tartly, and turning to one of the other girls called upon her for a recitation.

But it was Billie who had won the day. The girls knew it and Miss Cora knew it, and this helped to make the latter feel in a still more unkindly mood toward the girl with the "unladylike name."

"I'll watch her," thought Miss Cora angrily. "She isn't the kind to be trusted."

Laura and Violet were furious, and when they returned to the dormitory to prepare for lunch began to hatch all sorts of wild plans by which they could "lay this one of the Dill Pickles low."

"What's the excitement?" asked Rose, and Laura began heatedly to describe what had happened in the schoolroom, while several of the other girls gathered around.

When she came to Billie's answer the girls looked pleased and one of them clapped her hands.

"Good for you, Billie Bradley!" cried a dark girl, joyfully. "You must have given the Dill Pickle the surprise of her life."

"She bearded the lion in his den, the Pickle in her Hall," quoted another of the girls. "You know, I'd have given anything to have been there."

"And you a new girl, too," said another, looking at Billie with admiring eyes.

From that time on Billie became a noted figure among the hundred girls at Three Towers Hall, and her fame and popularity grew in leaps and bounds.

Rose Belser viewed this new state of affairs calmly at first, then with alarm, and later with dismay. That a new girl should come to Three Towers and immediately begin to shoulder herself into the limelight was unthinkable, impossible, it couldn't be done. And yet Billie Bradley was doing it!

After a while she began to draw away from Billie, look indifferent when one of the girls spoke of her praisingly, slighted her in a hundred little ways that Billie herself could hardy put her finger on. And yet she felt it.

Billie had one other constant enemy at Three Towers, and that was Miss Cora. Miss Cora never missed a chance to humiliate her--or at least try to humiliate her. But Billie was so happy and having such a wonderful time that she never gave these attempts any more attention than she would so many mosquito bites, thereby fanning Miss Cora's dislike of her.

Meanwhile the two Miss Dills grew more and more sour and crabbed until the girls began to wonder "why they didn't die of it." Then one noon time Laura came running into the dormitory, her eyes big and round with excitement.

"What do you think?" she cried, while the girls gathered round her. "I heard Miss Cora and Miss Ada talking together. I was in the lab and they were in the hall and they didn't know I was anywhere around."

"Well?" asked the girls impatiently as she paused for breath.

"They were talking about our meals," Laura went on. "They said we got altogether too much to eat."

"Too much to eat!" echoed the girls, looking at one another wonderingly.

"Why, we don't get any more than we want," said Billie.

"What else did they say, Laura?" urged Vi.

"That was about all." Laura had gone over to the wash basin and was washing her hands hard as though to get some of her dislike of the "Dill Pickles" out of her system. "I was so surprised I couldn't help hearing a couple of sentences. Then I coughed and came out of the lab and they looked as if they'd like to kill me. 'The girls are getting altogether too much to eat,' said Miss Ada." Laura mimicked her to perfection.

"'Yes,' said Miss Cora, 'we must give them less--a good deal less.'"

"Well, I'd just like to see them try it, that's all," said Billie, adding with a sigh: "Thank goodness, we still have Miss Walters, anyway.

She won't let us quite starve to death!"

CHAPTER XIII

FOUR ENEMIES

"Are we really going to have one, Billie Bradley? Oh, how wonderful!"

Several weeks had pa.s.sed, and this afternoon the five of them, Laura Jordon, Vi, Nellie Bane, Connie Danvers and Billie, were sitting close together at the very farthest end of Billie's dormitory talking over some plans that made them feel delightfully like conspirators.