“No, I don’t.  I am miserable.  You see, I have no real home, only a guardian, an old man, who doesn’t want me any more than I want to go, and is just as anxious as I am for the holidays to be over.  He is old, and an invalid too, poor old man, and he never will have any one to stay in the house, or allow me to; so it is dull, and one doesn’t feel very overjoyed at going home to it.  I can assure you I find it much more exciting to come back to school.  I suppose you have brothers and sisters and a real home?” looking across at Kitty with wistful eyes.

“Oh yes!” said Kitty, and then she fell to talking of them; and Miss Hammond and Pamela listened with such interest and laughter to her account of their escapades and adventures, that Kitty talked on and on, until at last they were interrupted by a cab drawing up before the house, and Miss Hammond had to go to welcome the new arrivals.

“I feel as though I knew Betty and Dan and Tony already,” said Pamela as they strolled down the corridor to their rooms.  “I wish I did.  And your father must be a perfect dear, I think.”

“He is,” said Kitty warmly, but with a catch in her voice; and from that moment she loved Pamela.  “I do wish,” she said impulsively, “I do wish you could come and stay with us, and know them all.  There isn’t very much to see at Gorlay, but there are beautiful places all round it, and we could have some jolly times.”

“I’d love to come,” said Pamela heartily.  “I know I should enjoy myself tremendously, I feel it in my bones.  But don’t ask me if you don’t really mean it, for I shall come, I tell you plainly.”

Kitty laughed, actually laughed quite gaily, and made up her mind that it should not be her fault if Pamela did not have at least one happy holiday.

The next day the girls were allowed to write home to announce their safe arrival.  Kitty wrote to her father a letter full of eagerness and promises, and longings for the holidays, which made Dr. Trenire smile and sigh as he laid it away in his pocket-book, and made the house seem emptier and less itself even than it had done before.  In with her father’s letter Kitty put one for Betty.  It was the first that young person had ever received, and it so filled her with a sense of importance that Anna and Tony said she was almost unbearable all the rest of the day.  How many times she read it over no one could have counted, but at every opportune and inopportune moment it was drawn out of her pocket, until at last it grew quite frayed at the edges, and, though scarcely a word it contained was confided to the others, Betty read it again and again with compressed lips and frowning brows, and an air of seriousness that nearly drove them frantic.

There was not much in it either to give rise to all this.