eelings.
Yet now, so great was her nervous dread of the school and all the
strangers she would have to meet, she felt quite pleased that there
would be at least those two familiar faces amongst them. "And that will
show how much I dread it," she said miserably to Betty the night before.
"Think of my being glad to see the Kitsons!"

"Oh well," said Betty cheerfully, "they will be some one to speak to,
and they will tell us the ways of the school, so that we shan't look
silly standing about not knowing what to do. They won't let the others
treat us as they treat new girls sometimes either, and that will be a
good thing," which was Betty's chief dread in going to the school.

Anna expressed no opinion on the matter at all. She was more than
usually nervous and fidgety in her manner, but she said nothing; and
whether she greatly dreaded the ordeal, or was quite calmly indifferent
about it, no one could tell.

But the feelings of the three as they walked to the school that first
morning were curiously alike, yet unlike. All three were very nervous.
Kitty felt a longing, such as she could hardly resist, to rush away to
Wenmere Woods and never be heard of again. Betty was so determined that
no one should guess the state of tremor she was in, lest they should
take advantage of it and tease her, that she quite overdid her air of
calm indifference, and appeared almost rudely contemptuous. Anna,
though outwardly by far the most nervous of the three, had her plans
ready and her mind made up. She was not going to be put upon, and she
was not going to let any one get the better of her; at the same time she
was going to be popular; though how she was going to manage it all she
could not decide until she saw her fellow-pupils and had gathered
something of what they were like. In the meantime nothing escaped her
sharp eyes or ears. All that Kitty or Betty could tell her about the
school, or Miss Richards, or the girls, especially the Kitsons, she
drank in and stored up in her memory, and they would have been
astonished beyond measure could they have known how much her hasty
wandering glances told her, resting, as they did, apparently on nothing.

Before the first morning was over she knew that Helen Rawson was admired
but feared; that Joyce Pearse was the most popular girl in the school,
and had taken a dislike to herself, but liked Kitty and Betty; that
Netta Anderson was Miss Richards's favourite pupil, and that she hersel