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 feelings.  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