a little,
pretty, silly thing, with blue eyes and pink cheeks and golden hair--all
beauty, you know, and no brains, like this girl! What's your name?
You're more an Azalea than I am."

"I'm Barbara Kendrick!" gasped that flaxen-headed member of the Upper
Third, not quite knowing whether to be flattered or offended.

"There you are--not a bit like a Barbara! Nothing in the least
barbarous about you. I think there ought to be a law against naming a
girl till she's old enough to choose for herself. Well, as I told you, I
was christened Azalea, but everybody saw from the first it didn't fit.
'She's a regular little gipsy!' Dad said; so they called me Gipsy, and
Gipsy I mean to be. I made Dad tell Miss Poppleton so, and enter me
Gipsy on the school books. I wasn't going to start in a new place as
Azalea."

"So you've been to school before?" said Dilys Fenton.

"Rather! I told you I've been to seven schools--three in America, two in
New Zealand, one in Australia, and one in South Africa. This is the
first English school I've tried."

"Seven--and you're only fourteen! Why, you must have been to a fresh one
every year!"

Gipsy nodded.

"You're just about right there. Never stayed more than two terms at any
of them. No--they didn't expel me! I tell you, I'm an absolute miracle
of good behaviour when I like. It was simply because Dad and I were
always moving on, and whenever he went to a fresh place I had to go to a
fresh school. You don't think I'd let him leave me in America when he
was going to Australia, do you?"

"Haven't you got a mother?" asked Barbara Kendrick.

"Shut up, you stupid!" murmured Dilys Fenton, giving Barbara a nudge.

Gipsy rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball, and unrolled it again
before she replied.

"I've nobody in the world but Dad," she answered, and there was just a
suspicion of huskiness in her voice. "He's never gone far away from me
before, but he's starting to-morrow for South Africa, and I'm to stop
here till he comes back. He says it won't seem long. I hope I'm going to
like it. I've only been three days in England, and you're the first
English girls I've spoken to. Dad said England ought to feel like home,
but it's a queer kind of home when one's all alone. Tell me what this
school is like. Is Miss Poppleton nice? She gushed over me before Dad in
the drawing-room, but she looks as if she could be a Tartar, all the
same. I've had a little experience with schoolmistresses. I c