id, Paris, and New York, after a
summer spent with relatives in Spain. Her mother had learned of Herndon
Hall from a chance traveling companion, and in some way had induced Miss
Thompson to waive her strict requirements for admission.

From her way of dressing her hair to her pointed slippers and broken
English, the little Mexican was even more markedly different from the
Herndon type than Adelle, and though the older girls knew enough of the
world to recognize a distinction in differences, Diane did not seem to.
She was gracious to all, and Adelle happened to be the first girl she
could speak to while she waited for her mother, who was closeted with
Miss Thompson. Here was Adelle's chance, although she did not recognize
it as such. They talked for an hour, rather Diane talked and Adelle did
her best to understand the rapid, lisping, birdlike notes of the
foreigner. She learned that Diane had a brother in a school near St.
Louis, another in a technical college, and still another now in Germany.
The Merelda family seemed much scattered, but that did not disturb the
little Mexican.

"We shall all be back in Morelos sometime!" She added sweetly, "Perhaps
you will come to Mexico with me, no?"

Adelle soon learned all about Madrid, the Spanish relatives, the sight
of the young King of Spain at San Sebastian, the trip to Lourdes which
the family had taken in hope that the holy cure might help her mother's
lame knee, and too much else to relate here. Senorita Diane was
exceedingly loquacious: her little tongue wove in and out of the new
idiom with surprising facility, forever wagging in a low, sweet babble
of nothings. Adelle, as has been sufficiently indicated, absorbed
passively the small and the large facts of life. Diane was like a
twittering bird on a tiny twig that shook with the vehemence of her
expression. She reacted instinctively to every stimulus from a new
toothbrush to the sight of a motor-car, and she preferred not to react
alone. Thus Adelle did more talking of her blunt, bald kind to her new
friend than she had accomplished hitherto all her life. She explained
Herndon Hall literally to the stranger, while Diane exclaimed in three
languages.

The presence of the little Mexican in the school did much to ameliorate
Adelle's lonely lot this second year. She formed a connecting link of a
sort between her and the rest of her schoolmates, who liked the
foreigner. Diane reported fully to Adelle what the other girls