turn her ancestral home into a
boarding-school. She thought a sense of mediaeval grandeur was good for
girls, especially young American girls, who are apt to be brought up
without proper respect for age, either of individuals or institutions.

In the dining-room, two long lines of portraits looked down from
opposite walls. One was headed by a grim old earl, and the other by an
equally grim old Pilgrim father of _Mayflower_ fame. The two lines
joined over the fireplace in the portraits of Madam Chartley's
great-grandparents. It was for this great-grandmother, a daughter of the
Pilgrims and a beautiful Washington belle, that Warwick Hall had been
built; for she refused to give up her native land entirely, even for the
son of an earl.

At his death, when the title and the English estates were inherited by a
distant cousin, the only male heir, this place on the Potomac was all
that was left to her and her daughter. It had been closed for two
generations. Now it had come down at last to Madam Chartley. Although
it found her too poor to keep up such an establishment, it also found
her too proud to let her heritage go to strangers, and practical enough
to find some way by which she might retain it comfortably. That way was
to turn it into a first-class boarding-school. She was a graduate of one
of the best American colleges. The patrician standards inherited from
her old world ancestors, combined with the energy and common sense of
the new, made her an ideal woman to undertake the education of young
girls, and Warwick Hall was an ideal place in which to carry out her
wise theories.

The Potomac was red with the glow of the sunset one September evening,
when four girls, on their way back to Washington after a day's
sightseeing, hurried to the upper deck of the steamboat. Some one had
called out that Warwick Hall was in sight. In their haste to reach the
railing, they scarcely noticed a tall girl in blue, already standing
there, who obligingly moved along to make room for them.

She scrutinized them closely, however, for she had seen them in the
cabin a little while before, and their conversation had been so amusing
that she longed to make their acquaintance. Her face brightened
expectantly at their approach, and, as they leaned over the railing, she
studied them with growing interest. The oldest one was near her own age,
she decided after a careful survey, about seventeen; and they were all
particular about the little thin