“I don’t call it bein’ sweet,” said Judith, “to watch Teacher every minute and smile all over your face if she looks at you and hold on to her hand when she’s talkin’ to you!  It’s silly!”

They argued all the way home, and the lunch hour was filled with appeals to their parents to take sides.  Professor and Mrs. Marshall, always ready, although occasionally somewhat absent, listeners to school news, professed themselves really interested in these new scholars and quite perplexed by the phenomenon of two beautiful dark-eyed children, called Camilla and Cecile Fingal.  Judith refused to twist her tongue to pronounce the last syllable accented, and her version of the name made it sound Celtic.  “Perhaps their father is Irish and the mother Italian or Spanish,” suggested Professor Marshall.

Sylvia was delighted with this hypothesis, and cried out enthusiastically, “Oh yes—­Camilla looks Italian—­like an Italian princess!”

Judith assumed an incredulous and derisive expression and remained silent, an achievement of self-control which Sylvia was never able to emulate.

The Fingal girls continued to occupy a large space in Sylvia’s thoughts and hours, and before long they held a unique position in the opinion of the school, which was divided about evenly between the extremes represented by Sylvia and Judith.  The various accomplishments of the new-comers were ground both for uneasy admiration and suspicion.  They could sing like birds, and, what seemed like witchcraft to the unmusical little Americans about them, they could sing in harmony as easily as they could carry an air.  And they recited with fire, ease, and evident enjoyment, instead of with the show of groaning, unwilling submission to authority which it was etiquette in the Washington Street School to show before beginning to “speak a piece.”

They were good at their books too, and altogether, with their quick docility, picturesqueness, and eagerness to please, were the delight of their teachers.  In the fifth grade, Sylvia’s example of intimate, admiring friendship definitely threw popular favor on the side of Camilla, who made every effort to disarm the hostility aroused by her too-numerous gifts of nature.  She was ready to be friends with the poorest and dullest of the girls, never asked the important roles in any games, hid rather than put forward the high marks she received in her studies, and was lavish with her invitations to her schoolmates to visit her at home.

The outside of this house, which Mr. Fingal had rented a month or so before when they first moved to La Chance, was like any one of many in the region; but the interior differed notably from those to which the other children were accustomed.  For one thing there was no “lady of the house,” Mrs. Fingal having died a short time before.  Camilla and Cecile could do exactly as they pleased, and they gave the freedom of the house and its contents lavishly to their little friends.  In the kitchen was an enormous old negro woman, always good-natured, always smelling of whiskey.  She kept on hand a supply of the most meltingly delicious cakes and cookies, and her liberal motto, “Heah, chile, put yo’ han’ in the cookie-jah and draw out what you lights on!” was always flourished in the faces of the schoolmates of the two daughters of the house.