Nan Sherwood's Summer Holidays Part 4

"At any rate, we don't have to think about Linda Riggs this time," Bess said in an effort to find one patch of brightness in the situation. "My, doesn't it seem good not to have her here this term!"

"Better than anything that has happened to us for a long time," Grace agreed. "But let's not crow too loud about it, you never know when she will turn up. Then you'll invite Mrs. Cupp, too?" she asked Bess, looking as though she was very glad she didn't have to do it.

"I suppose so," Bess agreed half heartedly. "How many will we invite?"

"I've been wondering about that, too," Rhoda spoke up. "And I can see no end to a list. Nan has so many friends that it is positively embarra.s.sing! We can't possibly have a dinner, even if Dr. Beulah and Mrs. Cupp would let us. There just wouldn't be enough room."

"Nor enough money," Amelia added significantly.

"That's right," Laura stuck in her oar. "How are we going to get the money to pay for all of this."

The question fell on a quiet room. No one had thought of paying for it!

Finally, Bess broke in on the silence, "Maybe I could get my father to send me some extra money this month," she offered doubtfully. "I could write and ask him for two months' allowance at once. I think he would do it." Bess did have a way with her father and mother that usually secured for her what she wanted, for she was an only child and they loved her dearly. For this reason, she had no conception at all of the value of money. "You seem to think," Nan often told her, "that it is something you go out and pick off from bushes. Don't you know that people work for money?"

Now it was Amelia who put a damper on Bess's generous but thoughtless offer. "That wouldn't be fair at all," she rejected Bess's proposal.

"Why?" This from Bess.

"Because we are all giving the party, and we all want to help."

"Thata girl, Amelia," Laura applauded slangily.

"Why can't we," Rhoda began slowly as though she hadn't quite worked the idea out in her own mind yet, "make up a list of people that we know would like to do something for Nan--goodness knows, there's enough of them--and invite them asking each one to contribute fifty cents to help take care of expenses?"

"But we couldn't ask Dr. Beulah to give fifty cents!" Grace cried out without even thinking.

"Of course not!" Laura agreed. "But we could make out a list of extra special people whom we would invite as guests. They wouldn't pay anything at all."

"That's perfect!" Bess chimed in. "That takes care of everything. At fifty cents apiece, we will have some money left, and we can use that to buy Nan a going away present."

"And Laura and Amelia and I will be the committee to buy the gift,"

Grace added. "And let's have the party on a Sunday afternoon and just serve simple refreshments so that there will be lots of money left over!"

"Yes, we want to get something nice for Nan, something that she would never buy for herself and something that she will use all the time she is away, so that she will think of us often," Bess added rather sadly, for she wasn't quite reconciled yet to Nan's going away without her.

"s.h.!.+ I hear someone coming, and it's not a cat this time," Laura whispered in the silence that followed Bess's statement.

Bess jumped up. "Everybody get busy," she just had time to say, "so that this will be the very nicest party Lakeview Hall has ever seen,"

before Nan burst into the room on the conspirators.

CHAPTER IV

DOUBT ON ALL SIDES

"Do you think she suspects?" Amelia asked Laura as the two walked down the corridor of the dormitory after working their way out of the confusion that followed Nan's breaking in on their secret meeting.

"She's pretty smart," Laura answered. "We'll never be sure but I think that Rhoda saved the day."

"The poise that girl has!" Amelia admired. "Every once in a while she does something with such grace and tact that you can just feel the generations of good breeding that are in back of her. She always knows what to say and when to say it. She's a girl in a million and so utterly unaware of it all too," she added half wistfully.

Tall, thin, angular Amelia had grown somewhat self-conscious about herself in the days since she first came out of Wauhegan to Lakeview Hall. It had done her good, however. She was developing into a less abrupt, more considerate sort of person than she was when, as a newcomer to Lakeview, she had taken part in the Procession of the Sawneys.

"Yes, she is unaware of it, fortunately," Laura answered. "She would be an awful sn.o.b, if she wasn't. Now, take Nan. I don't think she could be a sn.o.b no matter what happened to her. She's true blue all the way through."

"That's because she has known what it is to be poor," Amelia replied.

"Her family has often had to fight to get along."

"Not even money would have made a difference," Laura maintained. "Not to our Nan. Gee, but she's swell!"

But how "swell" she was, neither of the girls could really know, even as they couldn't know what a big surprise the surprise party they themselves were planning was going to be. Even as the arch-conspirators talked and planned the days away, a certain lady that was head of a certain school that you have all heard about in the Nan Sherwood books smiled to herself.

"This school is so full of plots," Dr. Beulah Prescott said to herself one night as she closed her office before retiring, "That I'm afraid it is positively demoralizing." But as she said it, her grey eyes twinkled and she looked for a moment as though she liked nothing better than plots and plotters. "Now let's see," she paused as she put the keys into her purse, "tomorrow I must see Professor Krenner and get in touch with Grace's parents again. I don't see how we are going to manage about Walter."

At the thought, she shook her head. Then she smiled again to herself.

"Problems, problems, problems all the while," she said as if she relished them all.

Alone in her own apartments in the dormitory that night, Dr. Beulah sat down with books and maps and plans and worked away until the small hours of the morning.

"Is there something wrong?" Nan asked the next day as the girls left German cla.s.s. Bess started guiltily.

"What do you mean, 'wrong'?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know exactly," Nan replied. "It's just a feeling I have that there is something in the air. Say, Bess, is Dr. Beulah sick?"

Bess breathed a sigh of relief. "Safe again," she thought. "Why, not that I know of," she answered quite truthfully. "What makes you ask?"

"I was up last night, late, sorting out some things that I don't want to take away with me, because I couldn't sleep, I was so excited. There was a light across the garden court in Dr. Beulah's apartment. I wondered about it then, but forgot it this morning until I noticed that Dr.

Beulah was not in Chapel. That's quite unusual."

"I noticed that, too," Bess puzzled, "but then so many strange things have been happening lately, that I've given up trying to solve them."

"Do you expect me to believe that?" Nan teased.

"Well, anyway," Bess half retracted what she had said, "I'm not as interested as I once was."

"And why, pray tell?" Nan was curious now.

Bess blushed, but the postman coming down the hall toward the offices relieved her discomfiture and perhaps saved the situation. It was hard for Bess to keep a secret from Nan.

Now they both paused to speak to the genial old man who brought their mail up from the village. "Anything for us?" It was Nan who spoke.

"Sure, and if it isn't pretty Nan Sherwood this fine mornin'," the old Irishman paused to look through the mail he was carrying. "And pray, who'd be after writing you in this springtime. Is it poetry you are expecting from some good-looking young gentleman?"