"Please don't spill the white of egg, or upset the gold-leaf. And as I shall be pupil-teacher of the youngest cla.s.s next term, I suppose I ought to tell you that 'seldomer' isn't in the English dictionary."

"I'm glad of it. I like my own words to belong to me, my own self. I should be ashamed to owe everything I say to silly Nuttall or stupid old Webster. You're artful, Lynette Mildare, trying to change the conversation. I say you don't sympathise with me properly in my affairs of the heart--and you never, never tell me about yours."

The beautiful black-rimmed, golden-tawny eyes laughed as some eyes can, though there was no quiver of a smile about the purely-modelled, close-folded lips.

"Don't tell me you never have, or never had, any," scolded Greta. "You're too lovely by half. Don't try to scowl me down--you are! I'm pretty enough to make the Billy Keyses stand on their silly heads if I told them to, but you're a great deal more. Also, you have style and grace and breeding.

Anybody could tell that you came of tremendously swell people over away in England, where the Dukes and Marquesses and Earls began fencing in the veld somewhere about the eleventh century, to keep common people from killing the deer, or carving their vulgar names on the castle walls, and coming between the wind and their n.o.bility. There's a quotation from your dear Shakespeare for you! He does come in handy sometimes."

"Doesn't he!" agreed Lynette, with an ardent flush.

"And you're descended from some of the people he wrote about," pressed Greta. "Own it!"

There was a faint line of sarcasm about the lovely lips.

"Shakespeare wrote of clowns and churls as well as of Kings and n.o.blemen."

"If you were a clown, you wouldn't be what you are. The very shape of your head, and ears, and nails, bespeaks a Princess, disguised as a finished head-pupil, going to take over a cla.s.s of grubby-fingered little ones--pah!--next term. And don't we all know that an English d.u.c.h.ess sends you your Christmas and Easter and birthday gifts! Come, you might as well speak out, when this is my last term, and we have always been such dear friends, and always will be," coaxed Greta, "because the d.u.c.h.ess lets you out, you know!"

She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there was a pained contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow on her face. Greta went on:

"We have all of us always known that you were--a mystery. Has it got anything to do with the d.u.c.h.ess?"

The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious to be pretty at the moment. Lynette met them with a full, grave, answering denial.

"No; I am nothing to the d.u.c.h.ess of Broads, or she to me. She is sister to the Mother-Superior, and she sends to me at Christmas and Easter, and on birthdays, by the Mother's wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the Princesse de Dignmont-Veziers, send Katie"--Katie was a little Irish novice--"presents from Paris twice a year?"

Greta's pretty eyebrows went up. Her blue greedy eyes became circular with surprise.

"Yes, of course--out of charity, because Katie was a foundling, picked up in the Irish quarter in Cape Town."

Lynette went on steadily, but, looking out of the window at the great wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the Convent wing in which were the nuns' cells.

"If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better."

"Lynette Mildare, you're never in earnest?"

The shocked tone and the scandalised disgust on Greta's pretty face stung and hurt. But Lynette went on:

"I speak the truth. The Mother and the Sisters, who have always known it, have kept the secret. In their great considerate kindness, they have never once let me feel there was any difference between me and the other girls--not once in all these years. And I can never thank them enough--never be grateful enough for their great goodness--especially _hers_." The steady voice shook a little.

"We all know that you have always been the Mother's favourite." There was a little cool inflection of contempt in Greta's high, sweet, birdlike tones that had been lacking before. "And she is the niece of a great English Cardinal, and the sister of a d.u.c.h.ess and a Princess, and her step-brother is an Earl." The inflection added for Greta: "_And yet she turns to the charity child!_"

Lynette said in a low voice:

"It is because she is perfect in the way of humility. She is beyond all pride ... greater than all prejudice ... she has been more to me than I can say, since she and Sister Ignatius and Sister Tobias found me on the veld seven years ago, when they were trekking up from Natal to join the Sisters who were already working here."

Greta's face dimpled, and the bright, cold eyes grew greedy again. There was a romance, after all.

"My gracious! How did you get there? Did your people lose you, or had you run away from home?"

The delicate wild-rose colour sank out of Lynette's cheeks. Her eyes sank under those bold, curious, blue ones of Greta's. She said, with a painful effort:

"I--had run away from the place that was called my home. I don't remember ever having lived anywhere else before."

"My! And ...?"

"It was a--dreadful place." A little convulsive shudder rippled through the girl's slight frame. Little points of moisture showed upon the delicate white temples, where clung the little stray rings and tendrils of the red-brown hair. "I wore worse rags than the children at the native kraals, and was worse fed. I scrubbed floors, and fetched water, and was beaten every day. Then"--she drew a deep, quivering breath--"I ran away--and--and ran until I could run no more, and fell down.... I don't remember being picked up. I woke up one day here at the Convent; and I was in bed, and my hair was cut short, and there was ice upon my head. I said, 'Where am I?' and the Mother-Superior stooped down and looked into my eyes, and said, 'You are at home.' And the Convent has been my home ever since, and I hope with all my heart it always will be!"

Greta descended from the desk. She drew her embroidered cambric skirts primly about her, and said in a shocked voice:

"And I asked you to visit me--to come and stay with us at our place near Johannesburg--you who are not even respectable!"

Lynette grew burning red. One moment her eyes wavered and fell. Then she lifted them and looked back bravely into the pretty, shallow, blue ones.

"That is why I have told you--what you know now."

"Of course," Greta said patronisingly, "if you wish it, I shall not tell the cla.s.s."

Lynette deliberately put away her tools and the calf-bound volume she had been working on, and shut and locked her desk. Then she rose. Her eyes swept over the long room, its lower end packed with giggling, whispering, squabbling, listening, gossiping, or reading girls. She said very clearly:

"It will be best that you should tell the cla.s.s. Do it now. The girls can think it over while they are away, and make up their minds whether they will speak to me or not when they come back. Make no delay."

Then she went, moving with the long, smooth, light step and upright, graceful carriage that she had somehow caught from the Mother-Superior, out of the room. Curious eyes followed her; sharp ears, that had caught fragments of the colloquy, wanted the rest; eager tongues plied Greta with questions, as she stood reticent, knowing, bursting with information withheld, in the middle of the cla.s.s-room, where honours she coveted had been won and prizes gained by the charity-bred foundling.

You may be sure that Greta told the story. It lost nothing by her telling, be equally sure. But all that heard it did not take it in Greta's way. The stamp of the woman who ruled this place was upon many minds and intellects and hearts here, and her teaching was to bear fruit in bitter, stormy, bloodstained years of days that were waiting at the very threshold.

"I tell you," said Christine Silber, the handsome Jewess, with a fierce flash of her black Oriental eyes, "foundling or charity girl, or whatever else you choose to call her, Lynette Mildare is the pride of the school."

Silber's father was President of the Groenfontein Legislative Council. A hum of a.s.sent followed on her utterance, and an English girl got up upon a form. She was the niece of a High Commissioner, daughter of a Secretary of Imperial Government, at Cape Town, who wrote K.C.M.G. after his name.

"Silber speaks the truth. Not a girl here is a patch on the shoes of Lynette Mildare. I am going home to London next winter to be presented, and we shall have a house in Chesterfield Gardens for the season, and if Lynette will come and visit us, I can tell her that she will be treated as an honoured guest. As for you, Greta Du Taine, who are always bragging about your father and his money, tell me which three letters of the alphabet you would find tattooed upon his conscience--if the strongest microscope ever made could find his conscience out? Shall _I_ tell you them?" She held up her finger. "Shall I tell you how he bought those orange-groves at Rustenburg--and the country seat near Johannesburg--and the drag with the silver-mounted harness and the team of blood bays?"

"No, please!" begged Greta, flinching from the torture.

But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters off upon her fingers:

"I. D. B."

A shout went up from the Red Cla.s.s.

Greta turned and ran.

IX