Priscilla Weir, Mabel Lushington, and Annie Brooke were all seated huddled up close together on the same low window-sill. The day was a glorious one in the beginning of July. The window behind the girls was open, and the softest of summer breezes came in and touched their young heads, playing with the tumbled locks of hair of different shades, varying from copper-colour to dark, and then to brightest gold.
Priscilla was the owner of the dark hair; Mabel possessed the copper-colour, Annie Brooke the gold. All three girls looked much about the same age, which might have been anything from sixteen to eighteen. Priscilla was perhaps slightly the youngest of the trio. She had dark-grey, thoughtful eyes; her face was pale, her mouth firm and resolved. It was a sad mouth for so young a girl, but was also capable of much sweetness. Mabel Lushington was made on a big scale. She was already well developed, and the copper in her lovely hair was accompanied by a complexion of peachlike bloom, by coral lips, and red-brown eyes. Those lips of hers were, as a rule, full of laughter. People said of Mabel that she was always either laughing or smiling. She was very much liked in the school, for she was at once good-natured and rich.
Annie Brooke was small. She was the sort of girl who would be described as petite. Her hair was bright and pretty. She had beautiful hands and feet, and light-blue eyes. But she was by no means so striking-looking as Mabel Lushington, or so thoughtful and intellectual as Priscilla Weir.
The post had just come in, and two of the girls had received letters. Priscilla read hers, turned a little paler than her wont, slipped it into her pocket, and sat very still, Mabel, on the contrary, held her unopened letter in her lap, and eagerly began to question Priscilla.
“Whom have you heard from? What is the matter with you? Why don’t you divulge the contents?”
“Yes, do, Priscilla, please,” said Annie Brooke, who was the soul of curiosity. “You know, Priscilla, you never could have secrets from your best friends.”
“I have got to leave school,” said Priscilla; “there is nothing more to be said. My uncle has written; he has made up his mind; he says I am to learn farming.”
“Farming!” cried the other two. “You—a girl!”
“Oh, dairy-work,” said Priscilla, “and the managing of a farm-house generally. If I don’t succeed within six months he will apprentice me, he says, to a dressmaker.”
“Oh, poor Priscilla! But you are a lady.”
“Uncle Josiah doesn’t mind.”
“What an old horror he must be!” said Annie Brooke.
“Yes. Don’t let us talk about it.” Priscilla jumped up, walked across the room, and took a book from its place on the shelf. As she did so she turned and faced her two companions.
The room in which the three found themselves was one of the most beautiful of the many beautiful rooms at Mrs Lyttelton’s school. The house was always called the School-House; and the girls, when asked where they were educated, replied with a certain modest pomposity, “At Mrs Lyttelton’s school.” Those who had been there knew the value of the announcement, for no school in the whole of England produced such girls: so well-bred, so thoroughly educated, so truly taught those things which make for honour, for purity, for a life of good report.
Mrs Lyttelton had a secret known but to a few: how