"All right, old thing! Don't get raggy!"

When the exhibits had been duly admired and notes compared as to their respective merits, a few of the best musical stars performed on the piano, then some round games were played, and the proceedings closed by the whole school forming a wide circle and singing "Auld Lang Syne" in the orthodox fashion with crossed hands.

The girls went unwillingly, and would have stayed for another half-hour if Miss Janet had not insisted upon their departure. Lorraine, putting on her boots in the cloak-room, decided that her first effort had been an unqualified success. It had certainly seemed to draw the school together in a bond of union, so far as she could judge. She could not resist a purr of satisfaction to Dorothy, whose coat hung next to hers.

Dorothy's congratulations were, however, half-hearted.

"I suppose they enjoyed it," she admitted grudgingly, "though I dare say some of them felt it a bore to be obliged to stay after four o'clock.

Vivien said you'd got the whole thing up to show off your own specimens."

The hot colour flamed to Lorraine's cheeks.

"Oh, what a shame! I _didn't_! I hardly showed any specimens myself, only a few ferns and photos, and one drawing. You _know_ it wasn't for my own glorification!"

Dorothy straightened her collar outside her coat as if its arrangement were the main object in life.

"Oh, _I'm_ not saying so!" she remarked carelessly. "I'm only telling you what I heard Vivien say. Effie Swan wondered you never asked _her_ to play when you asked Theresa Dawson."

"I couldn't ask them all--it wasn't a concert."

"She's very offended, though. I don't think she's going to come to the next social."

"Let her stay at home, then!" snapped Lorraine, thoroughly exasperated.

Dorothy consulted her watch.

"It's frightfully late!" she sighed. "I shan't have time to do my practising. We're going out to a concert to-night."

She sauntered away, having lodged several very unpleasant shafts, and leaving them to rankle.

For Lorraine, all the satisfaction of the afternoon had faded. Nothing hurts so much as the confidences of a so-called friend who tells you the disagreeable things that other people say about you. It is a particularly mean form of sincerity, for the remarks were probably never intended to be repeated. The mischief it often causes is incalculable.

Lorraine walked home, feeling that there was a barrier between herself and her cousin.

"I knew Vivien would be annoyed at my being head girl, but I didn't think she'd be so spiteful as that!" she ruminated. "Well, I don't care!

I shall go on with the 'socials' all the same, and with any other schemes that crop up. But it is horrid of her, because she might have been such a help to me!"

As the term went on, Lorraine began to see only too clearly that her two great obstacles in the school were Dorothy and Vivien. They did not openly thwart her, but there was a continual undercurrent of opposition, not marked enough for comment, but sufficiently galling. No matter what she proposed, they had always some objection to offer, and, though in the end they might hold up their hands with the rest, it was with an air of concession more than of whole-hearted agreement. They were the cleverest girls in the form, so it was hard to have to count them as opponents, rather than as allies, in her work. The other members of the Sixth, who had pa.s.sed up the school with her, she knew from experience would give scant help. Patsie was a good-natured rattle-trap, Audrey an amiable little goose; Nellie and Claire were very stodgy, ordinary girls, without an original idea between them, and not much notion of the responsibilities of monitresses.

"I want somebody to back me up, and act as lieutenant," thought Lorraine.

It was at this juncture that she discovered the capacities of Claudia.

She had, so far, taken very little notice of the newcomer, except by vaguely appreciating the fact of her extreme prettiness. Claudia had not pushed herself, and the intimacy which now sprang up between the two girls came of a mere chance. Miss Kingsley had asked the school to collect fruit-stones and nuts, to be sent to headquarters for use in the manufacture of gas-masks for the army. It was a point of patriotism for everyone to bring as many as possible.

Lorraine, strolling out one Sat.u.r.day on this errand, did not find it an easy matter to fill her basket. The appeal was a universal one in the town, and the Council School children had been on the common before her, picking up the beech-mast and acorns. As for hazel-nuts, there seemed not a solitary one left in the hedges. She was wandering disconsolately along, foraging with small success, when she happened to meet Claudia.

Lorraine held out her quarter-filled basket for sympathy.

"That's all I've been able to find, and if there are any more to be had, I'm sure I don't know where they are!"

"There are heaps of horse-chestnuts in the fields above our house,"

replied Claudia. "I'm going home now, and, if you care to come with me, I'll help you to get some."

Lorraine jumped at the offer, and the girls set off together up the road, chatting briskly.

The Castletons had only come lately to Porthkeverne. Mr. Castleton was an artist, and, attracted by the quaint streets, picturesque harbour, and the glorious cliffs and sea in the neighbourhood, he had taken Windy Howe, an empty farmhouse on a hill some way above the town, converting a big barn into a studio, and establishing himself there with easels, paint-boxes, and a huge pile of immense canvases.

A critic had once described Mr. Castleton as a genius who had just missed fire, and the simile was an apt one. His large pictures were good, but not always good enough to hit the public taste. He was constantly changing his style, and one year would astonish the exhibitions by misty impressionism, and the next would return to pre-Raphaelite methods. He had dabbled in sculpture, ill.u.s.tration, frescoes, and miniature painting, and had published two volumes of minor poems, which, unfortunately, had never commanded a good sale. He was a handsome, interesting man, utterly unpractical and irrational, delightful to talk to, but exasperating in the extreme to those with whom he had business. The quaint, old-fashioned homestead on the hill, with its low-ceiled bedrooms, panelled parlours, black-beamed kitchen, ivied porch, thick hedge of fuchsias, and view over a stretch of heath and the dancing waters of the bay, satisfied his artistic temperament, and provided a suitable background for the new ideas which he was constantly evolving. Moreover--though this was quite a secondary consideration--it afforded sufficient accommodation for his family.

Lorraine's first impression of the Castletons was that they went in for both quality and quant.i.ty. They numbered nine, and all had the same nicely-shaped noses, Cupid mouths, irreproachable complexions, neat teeth, dark-fringed blue eyes, and shining sunlit hair. They were a veritable gold-mine to artists, and their portraits had been painted constantly by their father and his friends. Pictures of them in various costumes and poses had appeared as coloured supplements to annuals or as frontispieces in magazines; they had figured in the Academy, and had been bought for permanent collections in local art galleries. The features of Morland, Claudia, Landry, Beata, Romola, and Madox had for years been familiar to frequenters of provincial exhibitions, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, and sometimes with the lovely mother, whose profile was considered a near approach to that of the cla.s.sic statue of Ceres.

Five years before this story opens, pretty, impetuous, blue-eyed Mrs.

Castleton had suddenly resigned all the sad and glad things that make up the puzzle we call life, and pa.s.sed on to sample the ways of a wider world. For the first six months her husband had mourned for her distractedly, and had written quite a little volume of poems in her memory; for the next eight months he was attractively pensive, and then--all in a few weeks--he fell in love again and married his model, a girl of barely seventeen, with a beautiful Burne-Jones face and a c.o.c.kney accent. In the following few years three more carnation-cheeked, golden-haired little Castletons--Constable, Lilith, and Perugia--had tumbled into this planet to form a second nursery, and were already learning to sit for their portraits in various attractive studio poses.

Claudia, running into the house to fetch an extra basket for the horse-chestnuts, introduced Lorraine to a few members of the family who happened to be straying about, showed her a row of pictures in the dining-room, and escorted her through the gap at the bottom of the garden into the fields at the back of the barn.

Sitting on the farther gate, whittling a stick, was a boy of seventeen, with the unmistakable Castleton features and sunlit hair.

"Hallo, Morland!" cried Claudia. "We're going to get chestnuts. Do come and help; there's a sport! This is Lorraine Forrester."

Morland would no doubt have performed the orthodox ceremony of lifting his cap, but, being bareheaded, he grinned and shook hands instead.

"Don't advise you to eat them--they're beastly!" he vouchsafed.

"We're not going to--they're for the soldiers!"

"Then I pity the poor beggars, that's all."

"They're not to be eaten, they're to be made into gas-masks. I told you all about it, Morland," declared Claudia.

"I've a shocking memory," he demurred. "But whatever they're for I'll help you get some. Here, give me this to carry," and he took Lorraine's basket and hung it over his arm.

There were plenty of chestnuts lying on the ground under the trees, and more hanging on the branches which could be dislodged by a well-aimed stone. The young people spent a profitable half-hour, and filled their handkerchiefs as well as their baskets.

"I shall have heaps now!" exulted Lorraine. "You two are trumps to have helped me!"

"I'd nothing else to do," said Morland.

"Wouldn't Violet let you practise?" asked Claudia quickly.

"No, she said it woke up Perugia!"

Claudia shrugged her shoulders eloquently.

"It's always the way!" she replied.

"Are you fond of music?" asked Lorraine.

"Love it! It's the only thing I _do_ care about. I'd play all day and night if Violet didn't turn me out. She locks the piano sometimes."