Chattering and laughing, and asking eager questions, the girls hurried up the stairs to Mrs. Sherman’s room.  Almost a year had gone by since Eugenia and Lloyd had parted on the lantern decked lawn at Locust, the last night of the house party.  The year had made little difference in Lloyd, but Eugenia had grown so tall that the change was startling.

“Really, you are taller than I,” exclaimed Mrs. Sherman, in the midst of an affectionate greeting, as she held her off for a better view.

“And doesn’t she look stylish and young ladyfied, with her skirts down to her ankles,” added Lloyd.  “You’d nevah think that she was only fifteen, would you?”

“I had to have them made long,” explained Eugenia, much flattered by Lloyd’s speech.  It was her greatest wish to appear “grown up.”  “Papa says that I am probably as tall now as I shall ever be, and really I’d look ridiculous with my dresses any shorter.”

Mrs. Sherman noticed presently, with a smile, that Eugenia seemed to have gained dignity with her added height.  There was something amusingly patronising in her manner toward the younger girls.  She answered Lloyd several times with an “Oh, no, child” that was almost grandmotherly in its tone.

“But here is somebody who has come back just as sweet and childlike as ever,” thought Mrs. Sherman, twisting one of Betty’s brown curls around her finger.  Then she said aloud.  “Was the trip as delightful as you dreamed it would be, my little Tusitala?”

“Oh, yes, godmother,” sighed Betty, blissfully.  “It was a thousand times better!  And the best of it is my eyes are as well as ever.  I needn’t be afraid, now, of that ‘long night’ that haunted me like a bad dream.”

All during dinner Fidelia kept looking across at the merry party sitting at the next table, and wished she could be with them.  She could not help hearing all they said, for they were only a few feet away, and there was no one talking at the table where she sat.  The boys were in the children’s dining-room with Fanchette, and her mother was spending the evening with some friends at the new hotel across the way.

“I’m going to make believe that I’m one of them,” the lonely child said to herself, smiling as she caught a friendly nod from Betty.  So she listened eagerly to Mr. Forbes’s account of their visit to Venice, and to the volcano of Vesuvius, and laughed with the others over the amusing experiences Betty and Eugenia had in Norway with a chambermaid who could not understand them, and in Holland with an old Dutch market-woman, the day they became separated from Mr. Forbes, and were lost for several hours.

Fidelia’s salad almost choked her, there was such an ache in her throat when she heard them planning an excursion for the next day.  She had no one to make plans with, and when she was taken sightseeing it was by a French teacher, more intent on improving her pupil’s accent than in giving her a happy time.