“I do think it is so silly,” cried Betty, “to have one’s meals always at the same time, sitting around a table in a room in a house, when one can enjoy them ever so much more if they come at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of places.”

“Oh, but it wouldn’t be right to have them like that often,” said Anna primly.  “You would have indigestion if you didn’t have your meals at regular hours.”  Anna was always full of ideas as to what was right and good for her health.

“I didn’t know I had an indigestion,” said Betty shortly, with a toss of her head, “and you wouldn’t either, Anna, if you didn’t think so much about it.”  Which was truer than Betty imagined.  “I think it is a pity you talk so much about such things.”

In September Dan went off to school.  He was very homesick and not at all happy when the last day came—­a fact which consoled Kitty somewhat for all the pleasure and excitement he had shown up to that point.  “If it hadn’t been for Aunt Pike and Anna I believe he would have been frightfully sorry all the time,” she told herself, “instead of seeming as though he was quite glad to go.”

“You’ll—­you’ll write to a fellow pretty often, won’t you, Kit?” he asked, coming into her room for about the fiftieth time, and wandering about it irresolutely.  He spoke in an off-hand manner, and made a show of looking over her bookshelves whilst he was speaking.  But Kitty understood, and in her heart she vowed that nothing should prevent her writing, neither health, nor work, nor other interests.  Dan wanted her letters, and Dan should have them.

But it was after he was gone that the blow of his departure was felt most, and then the blank seemed almost too great to be borne.  It was so great that the girls were really almost glad when their own school opened, that they might have an entirely new life in place of the old one so changed.

“Though I would rather go right away, ever so far, to a boarding school,” declared Betty, “where everything and everybody would be quite, quite different.”  But Kitty could not agree to this.  It was quite bad enough for her as it was; to leave Gorlay would be more than she could bear.

“Hillside,” the school to which they were being sent—­the only one of its kind in Gorlay, in fact—­was about ten minutes’ walk from Dr. Trenire’s house.  It was quite a small school, consisting of about a dozen pupils only, several of whom were boarders; and Miss Richards (the head of it), Miss Melinda (her sister), and a French governess instructed the twelve.

“It is not, in the strict sense of the word, a school,” Miss Richards always remarked to the parents of new pupils.  “We want it to be ‘a home from home’ for our pupils, and I think I may say it is that.”

“If our homes were in the least bit like it we should never want any holidays,” one girl remarked; but we know that it is almost a point of honour with some girls never to admit—­until they have left it—­that school is anything but a place of exile and unhappiness,—­though when they have left it they talk of it as all that was delightful.