"I suppose it was Uncle Tristram's wife and child," replied Everard thoughtfully. "He must have called the kid 'Leslie' after Grandfather.

They ought to have christened _me_ 'Leslie.' I can't think why they didn't."

"Have we a cousin Leslie, then, whom we don't know?"

"I suppose we must have, somewhere!"

"How fearfully thrilling!"

"Um! I don't know that it's thrilling at all. It's the first I've heard of it until to-day. I wish our father had been the eldest son, instead of Uncle Tristram!"

"Why? What does it matter?"

"It may matter more than you think. You're a silly little goose, Dulcie, and, as I often tell you, you never see farther than the end of your own nose. Surely, after all these years, though, Grandfather _must_----"

"Must what?" asked Lilias curiously.

"Never you mind! Girls can't know everything!" snapped Everard, walking on in front of his sisters with a look of unwonted worry upon his usually careless and handsome young face.

CHAPTER III

A Valentine Party

Chilcombe Hall, where Lilias and Dulcie had been boarders for the last two years, was an exceedingly nice school. It stood on a hill-side well raised above the river, and behind it there was a little wood where bulbs had been naturalized, and where, in their season, you might find clumps of pure white snowdrops, sheets of glorious daffodils, and later on lovely ma.s.ses of the lily of the valley. In the garden all kinds of sweet things seemed to be blooming the whole year round. Golden aconite buds opened with the January term, and in a wild patch above the rockery the delicious heliotrope-scented _Petasites fragrans_ blossomed to tempt the bees which an hour's sunshine would bring forth from the hives, scarlet _Pyrus j.a.panica_ was trained along the wall under the front windows, and early flowering cherry and almond blossoms made delicate pink patches of color long before leaves were showing on the trees.

Beautiful surroundings in a school can be quite as important a part of our education as the textbooks through which we toil. We are made up of body, mind, and spirit, and the developing soul needs satisfying as much as the physical or mental part of us. Long years afterwards, though we utterly forget the lessons we may have learnt as children, we can still vividly recall the effect of the afternoon sun streaming through the fuchsia bush outside the open French window where we sat conning those unremembered tasks. The lovely things of nature, a.s.similated half unconsciously when we are young, equip us with a purity of heart and a refinement of taste that should safeguard us later, and keep our thoughts at a lofty level.

The "beauty cult" was a decided feature of Chilcombe Hall. Miss Walters was extremely artistic; she painted well in water-colors and had exquisite taste. Many of the charming decorations in the house had been done by herself; she had designed and stencilled the frieze of drooping cl.u.s.ters of wistaria that decorated the dining-hall wall; the framed landscapes in the drawing-room were her own work, and she herself always superintended the arrangement of the bowls of flowers that gave such brightness to the schoolrooms.

Her twenty pupils had on the whole a decidedly pleasant time. There were just enough of them to develop the community spirit, but not too many to obliterate the individual, or, as Ida Spenser put it: "You can get up a play, or a dance, or any other sort of fun, and yet we all know each other like a kind of big family."

"Divided up into small families according to bedrooms!" added Hester Wilson.

The bedrooms at Chilcombe Hall were rather a speciality. They were large, and were furnished partly as studies, and girls had their own bookcases, knick-knacks, and pretty things there. As the house was provided with central heating, they were warmed, and a certain amount of preparation was done in them each afternoon. Miss Walters' artistic faculty had decorated them in schemes of various colors, so that they were known respectively as The Rose, The Gold, The Green, The Brown, and The Blue Bedrooms. Lilias and Dulcie Ingleton, Gowan Barbour, and Bertha Chesters, who occupied the last-named, considered it quite the choicest of all. They had each made important contributions to its furniture, had clubbed together to buy a Liberty table-cloth, had provided vases in lovely shades of turquoise blue, and had worked toilet-mats, nightdress cases and other accessories to accord with the prevailing tone. "The Blue Grotto," as they named their dormitory, certainly had points over rival bedrooms, for it looked down the garden towards the river, and had the best view of the sunset. Moreover, it was at the very end of the corridor, so that sudden outbursts of laughter did not meet the ears of Miss Hardy quite so easily as from the Rose or the Brown room.

The work of the spring term had been in full swing for nearly a month, when Gowan Barbour, looking at the calendar--hand-painted, with blue cranesbill geraniums--suddenly discovered that next morning would be the festival of St. Valentine.

"Could anything be better?" she exulted. "We've won the record for tidiness three weeks running, so we're ent.i.tled to a special indulgence.

I vote we ask to bring tea up here, and have a Valentine party. Don't you think it would be rather scrumptious? I've all sorts of ideas in my head."

"Topping!" agreed Dulcie, pausing in the act of tying her hair ribbon to consider the important question, "specially if we could get Miss Walters to let us send to Glazebrook for a few cakes. I believe she would, if we wheedled!"

"What about visitors?" asked Lilias. "It would be much more of a party if we had a few of the others in."

"We don't want a crowd, or we might as well be in the dining-hall,"

objected Bertha.

"Well, of course we shouldn't ask the whole school, naturally, but perhaps just Noreen and Phillida!"

"We must get at the soft spot in Miss Walters' heart," decided Gowan.

"Pick a bunch of early violets if you can find them, lay them on her study table, talk about flowers and nature for a little while, then ask if we may have a quiet little party in our bedroom to-morrow afternoon, with cakes at our own expense."

"Quiet?" queried Lilias.

"Well, of course you couldn't call it rowdy, could you? We'll send you to do the asking. Those dimples of yours generally get what you want, and on the whole I think you're the pattern one of us, and the most likely to be listened to."

Tea at Chilcombe Hall was a quite informal meal. It partook, indeed more of the nature of a canteen. The urns were what the girls called "on tap"

from four to four-thirty, and during summer any one might take cup, saucer, and plate into the garden, provided she duly brought them back afterwards to the dining-hall. Special permission for a bedroom feast was therefore not very difficult to obtain, and Lilias returned from her interview in the study with her dimples conspicuously in evidence.

"Well?" asked the interested circle in the Blue bedroom.

"Sweet as honey!" reported Lilias. "She said 'Certainly, my dear!' We may each ask one friend, and we may spend two shillings amongst us on cakes, if we give the money and the list of what we want to Jones this afternoon, because he's going into Glazebrook first thing to-morrow morning."

"Only two shillings!" commented Gowan.

"It will go no way!" pouted Bertha.

"Well, I can't help it. Miss Walters said 'Two shillings' most emphatically."

"You might have stuck out for more! Those iced cakes are always half a crown!"

"I didn't dare to stick out for anything. I was so afraid she'd change her mind, and say 'There's good plain home-made cake with your schoolroom tea, and you must be content with that,' like she did to Nona and Muriel."

"We could get twelve twopenny cakes for two shillings," calculated Dulcie; "but if there are eight of us, that's only one and a half apiece."

"Best get eight twopenny iced cakes, and eight penny buns," suggested Bertha, taking pencil and paper to write the important order.

"Right-o! Only be sure you put _pink_ iced cakes, they are so much the nicest."

"Whom shall we ask? It won't be much of a beano on two shillings. Still, they'll be keen on coming, I expect."

Noreen, Phillida, Prissie, and Edith, the four finally selected favorites, accepted the invitation with alacrity. Bedroom tea-parties were indulgences only given to winners of three weeks' dormitory records, so the less fortunate occupants of the Brown and Rose rooms were really profiting by the tidiness of their hostesses. The Blue Grotto was placed in apple-pie order on the afternoon of the fourteenth of February. A white hemst.i.tched cloth and a bowl of snowdrops adorned the center table, and the cakes were set out on paper doilies. Both hostesses and guests were in the dining-hall by four o'clock, awaiting the appearance of the urns, and each bore her cup of tea and a portion of bread and b.u.t.ter and scones upstairs with her.

It was a jolly party round the square table, and if the cakes were not too plentiful, they were at least voted delicious. The girls carried down the cups when they had finished, shook the table-cloth out of the window, carefully collected crumbs from the floor, so as to preserve their record for neatness, then gathered round the table again for an hour's fun before the bell should ring for prep.

"It's a Valentine party, and I've got a ripping idea," said Gowan.

"We'll put our names on pieces of paper, fold them up, shuffle them and draw them; then each of us must write a valentine to the one we've drawn. We'll shuffle these, and one of us must read them all out. Then we must each guess who's written our valentines."

"Sounds rather brainy, doesn't it?" objected Noreen. "I don't think I'm any hand at poetry!"

"Oh! you can make up something if you try. Valentines are generally doggerel."

"Need it be quite original?" asked Edith.

"Well, if you really _can't_ compose anything, we'll allow quotations."