“You will get on all right,” she said, with another sigh; “but I was never meant to go where there are other people.”

“That is why you’ve got to go.  It is good for you; I heard Aunt Pike saying so to father.  She said you were growing up shy and gauche.  I don’t know what gauche means; do you?”

“No,” said Kitty, colouring.  “I expect I ought to, and I expect it is something dreadful; but if I am happier so, why can’t I go on being gauche?”

“Father said you were very shy, but he didn’t think you were the other thing—­gauche.”

“Did he?” cried poor Kitty, brightening; but her face soon fell again.  “Father doesn’t notice things as quickly as some people do—­Aunt Pike, and Lady Kitson, and others; and I expect they are right.  It is always the disagreeable people and the disagreeable things that are right.  Did Aunt Pike say the same thing of you?”

“No; she said I had too much—­it was a long word—­too much self—­self—­ oh, I know, confidence—­self-confidence.  I don’t know what it means, but I am sure I haven’t got it; and if I have,” wound up Betty defiantly, “I won’t get cured of it.  Do you know what it means, Kitty?”

“Yes,” said Kitty thoughtfully, “I think I do; but I don’t see how going to the same school can cure us both.”

At the end of a few days Mrs. Pike went away to get Anna, and to collect their numerous belongings; and the doctor’s household felt that it had before it one week of glorious freedom, but only one.

In anticipation of this, their last happy free time, the children had made plans for each day of it, intending to enjoy them to the utmost.  Somehow, though, things were different.  There was a shadow even over their freedom—­if it was not there in the morning, it fell before night—­and they returned home each day weighted with a sense of weariness and depression.  There was the shadow, too, of Dan’s departure, and a very deep shadow it was.

“Things will never, never be the same again,” said Kitty sagely.  “Dan won’t know about all that we do; and when he gets a lot of boy friends he won’t care very much.”

There was also the shadow of their own school and the constant companionship of Anna, and this was a dense shadow indeed.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if she was jolly and nice, but it will be like having a spy always with us,” said Betty.  “She will tell Aunt Pike everything.”

“You don’t know,” said Dan, to tease them.  “Anna may have grown up quite different from what she was, and be as jolly as possible.”  But the suggestion did not console the girls; to them it only seemed that Dan was already forsaking them, that this was but another step over to the enemy.

“She couldn’t be jolly,” said Betty firmly.  “She wouldn’t know how, and Aunt Pike wouldn’t let her if she wanted to.  And even if she seemed so, I shouldn’t feel that I could trust her.”