ver 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.

Amongst the boarders, and loudest in their complaints of all they had to
endure, were Lettice and Maude Kitson, who had been placed there by
their step-mother for a year to "finish" their education before they
"came out." It was a pity, for they were too old for the school, and it
would have been better for themselves and every one had they been sent
amongst older girls and stricter teachers, where they would not have
been the leading pupils and young ladies of social importance.
They laughed and scoffed at the usual simple tastes and amusements of
schoolgirls, and, one being seventeen and the other eighteen, they
considered themselves women, who, had it not been for their unkind
stepmother, would have been out in society now instead of at school
grinding away at lessons and studies quite beneath them. Their talk and
their ideas were worldly and foolish too, and as they lacked the sense
and the good taste which might have checked them, they were anything but
improving to any girls they came in contact with.

Kitty had never liked either of the Kitson girls; they had nothing in
common, and everything Lettice and Maude did jarred on her. They seemed
to her silly and vulgar, and they did little petty, mean things, and
laughed and sneered at people in a way that hurt Kitty's f