From the moment the doors were opened the citizens of Oakdale looked inside, feeling particularly good-natured after their Thanksgiving dinners, and prepared to spend their money.

“It’s perfectly wonderful what these children have managed to do on nothing whatever,” Miss Thompson was saying, as she and Mrs. Nesbit, in the guise of sightseers, were strolling down the middle of the hall.

“It looks to me like a scene from an opera,” replied Mrs. Nesbit.

“Yes, we are all very prosperous and clean comic opera gypsies, Mrs. Nesbit,” said Hippy Wingate, who had come up just in time to hear Mrs. Nesbit’s remark.

“Why, Hippy Wingate, I never should have recognized you.  You look like the big smuggler in ‘Carmen.’  I have forgotten his name.”

“I am a smuggler, Mrs. Nesbit,” put in Hippy mysteriously.  “But don’t give me away.  It’s not lace goods I’ve brought over the border, nor bales of silk and such things.  Isn’t that what gypsies are supposed usually to smuggle?”

“I believe it is,” answered Mrs. Nesbit.  “At least they always appear in plays and pictures seated at the foot of a high, rocky cliff in some lonely spot, with bales and casks and strange looking bundles about.  No one would be heartless enough to ask what was inside the bundles, but I have always had a strong suspicion that it was excelsior.”

“What have you been smuggling, Hippy?” asked Miss Thompson.  “I wonder you managed to get it past that line of watchful gipsy girls.”

“I won’t give it away,” replied Hippy.  “It’s a surprise.  You’ll see, and I wager it will be the talk of the place before the evening is over.”

“Is it animal, vegetable or mineral, Hippy?” demanded Mrs. Nesbit.

“Animal,” replied Hippy.  “Very much animal.”

“Now, what in the world,” the two women exclaimed, their curiosity piqued.

“Hippy, I wish you would come on and get to work,” called Grace over her shoulder, as she hurried past, and Hippy darted after her, remembering that he had not done a thing that evening to assist the girls.

“How fine Grace Harlowe does look, Mrs. Nesbit,” remarked Miss Thompson, “and how I shall miss her when she leaves the High School!  The time goes too quickly to suit me, when all these nice girls leave us for college.”

Miss Thompson still cherished a deep regard for Grace, although, since the circumstance of Grace’s refusal to betray Eleanor, narrated in “Grace Harlowe’s junior year at high school,” the two had never returned to quite the same footing as formerly.

Grace was, indeed, the picture of a beautiful gipsy girl who in romance turns out not to be a gipsy at all, but a princess stolen in her youth.  She wore a skirt of red trimmed in black and yellow, a full white blouse and a little black velvet bolero.  Around her waist she had tied a gayly colored sash, while on her head was a gipsy headdress bordered with gold fringe.