CHAPTER VII
LAKEVIEW HALL APPEARS
"Well! I would have boxed her ears, I don't care!" Bess gasped, when Nan succeeded in pulling her down into her chair. "You ought to have heard what she said about you----"
"I'm glad I didn't," Nan answered and sighed. "And one good thing--it broke up that foolish speech-making. I'm so ashamed----"
"Of me!" flared up Bess. "I was only standing up for you."
"Hereafter, dear, do your standing up, sitting down," laughed Nan, hugging her still overwrought chum.
"Well," pouted the tearful Bess, "I--I don't care!"
"I'll fight my own battles."
"But you never fight!" burst out Bess.
"Isn't that just as well?" Nan observed, rather gravely. "Suppose your mother heard of your wanting to box a girl's ears in a public place like this car? And how Professor Krenner looked at you!"
"Oh, I don't care for him," muttered Bess.
"Of course you do. He will be one of our teachers."
"That Riggs girl says that none of the girls at the Hall think much of Professor Krenner," grumbled Bess. "They say he's cracked."
"I wouldn't repeat what that Riggs girl says," admonished Nan, with some sharpness. It exasperated her for Bess to show that she had been influenced at all by the rude rich girl.
"Well, I've found out I don't like her," Bess sighed.
"I discovered I didn't, before," Nan rejoined, dryly.
"But she'll tell awful stories about us at Lakeview Hall," Bess said with a worried air.
"Let her tell," scoffed the more sensible Nan.
"We--ell! We don't want to begin school with all the girls against us."
"They'll not be. Do you suppose that girl has much influence with the nice, sensible girls who attend Lakeview Hall?"
"We--ell!" exclaimed Bess, again. "She's rich."
"Bess! I'm astonished at you," declared Nan, with some heat. "Any one to hear you would think you a money-worshipper. How can you bear to be friends with me when my folks are poor."
Bess began to laugh at her. "Poor?" she repeated. "And your dear mother just fallen heir to fifty thousand dollars?"
"Oh--well--I forgot that," returned Nan, meekly. "But I know you loved me before we had any prospect of having money, Bess. Don't let's toady to rich girls when we get to this school. Let's pick our friends by some other standard."
"I guess you're right," agreed her chum. "I've had a lesson. That hateful thing! But if she does tell stories about us to the other girls----"
"We can disprove them by Professor Krenner," added Nan. "Don't worry."
"I don't like him," repeated Bess, pouting.
But Nan did. She was quite sure the instructor with the big, shell-rimmed spectacles, understood girls very well indeed, and that he would be a good friend and a jolly companion if one would allow him to be.
There was that about Professor Krenner that reminded her of her own dear father. They were both given to little, dry jokes; they were both big men, with large, strong hands; and they were both very observant.
How she would get along with the other instructors at Lakeview Hall, and with Dr. Beulah Prescott, herself, Nan did not know; but she felt that she and Professor Krenner would always be good friends.
Nor was she afraid of what Linda might say about her at the Hall. Nan Sherwood was deeply hurt by the girl's arrogance and unkindness; but she had too large a fund of good sense to be disturbed, as Bess was, over Linda's threatened scandal.
"I don't believe a girl like her really has much influence among other girls--not the right kind of girls, at any rate," Nan thought. "And Bess and I don't want to get in with any other kind."
She was just as eager as she could be, however, to get to Lakeview Hall, and find out what it and the girls were like. Boarding school was an unknown world to Nan. She felt more confidence now in herself, as the train bore her toward the wild Huron shore on which the school stood, than she had when she journeyed up into the Michigan woods with her Uncle Henry, back in mid-winter.
In that past time she was leaving her dear parents and they were leaving her. Each revolution of the car wheels were widening the space between "Momsey" and "Papa Sherwood," and herself. By this time Nan had grown used to their absence. She missed them keenly--she would do that up to the very moment that they again rejoined her; but the pain of their absence was like that of an old wound.
Meanwhile she was determined, was Nan, to render such a report of her school-life to her parents as would make them proud of her.
Nan was not a particularly brilliant girl in her books. She always stood well in her classes because she was a conscientious and a faithful student. Bess, really, was the quicker and cleverer of the two in their studies.
Nan was very vigorous, and loved play much more heartily than she did her books. Demerits had not often come her way, however, either in grammar school or high school. Mr. Mangel, the Tillbury principal, had felt no hesitancy in viseing Nan's application blank for entrance to the same grade as Bess Harley at Lakeview Hall. Nan, he knew, would not disappoint Dr. Beulah Prescott.
This school that she was going to, Nan knew, would be very different from the public school she had attended heretofore. In the first place, it was a girls' world; there would be neither association with, nor competition with, pupils of the other sex.
Nan was not wholly sure that she would like this phase of her new school life. She liked boys and had always associated with them.
Nan could climb, row, skate, swim, and cut her initials in the bark of a tree without cutting her fingers.
Her vigorous life in the woods during the past six months had stored up within her a greater supply of energy than she had ever before possessed. She had, too, seen men and boys doing really big things in the woods; she had seen courage displayed; she had partaken of adventures herself that called upon her reserves of character, as well as muscle.
Indeed, Nan was quite a different girl in some respects from the timid, wondering child who had gone away from Tillbury clinging to Uncle Henry's hand. More than ever she felt the protecting instinct stir within her when she saw her chum going wrong. She knew she must assume the burden of looking after Bess Harley in this new world they were entering.
Two hundred girls to compete with! It looked to be such a lot! Lakeview Hall was a very popular institution, and although the building was not originally intended for a school, it answered amply for that purpose--as Professor Krenner told her. One end of the great structure had never been completed; for its builder's ideas had been greater than his resources.
She knew that the castle-like structure standing upon the bluff overlooking Freeling and the troubled waters of Lake Huron, was much too vast for a private dwelling, and that as a summer hotel it had years before signally failed.
Under the executive care of Dr. Beulah Prescott the place had expanded into a large and well-governed school. Nan looked forward with both hope and fear to meeting so many other girls all at the same time.
The cost of tuition at Lakeview precluded the presence of many pupils whose parents were not at least moderately wealthy. In fact, it was a very exclusive school, or "select" as Linda Riggs had called it during her brief hour of friendship with Bess Harley. Nan devoutly hoped that not many of the other girls would be as "select" as Linda Riggs.
Among the two hundred girls, surely not many could be so purse-proud and arrogant as the railroad magnate's daughter. Nan had not been long enough removed from poverty to feel that she really was rich, nor was it, after all, an enormous fortune. Her mother's money was altogether too new an acquisition to have made much of an impression upon Nan's mind, save to stir her imagination.
She could, and did, imagine a sublimated "dwelling in amity" on the little by-street in Tillbury. She looked forward to the time when she and her parents would be together in their old home; but she could not imagine their style of living changed to any degree.
The life before Nan in the boarding school, however, she realized would be different from anything she had ever experienced. Later, as dusk began to shut down and the switch targets twinkled along the right of way, she peered ahead eagerly for the first sight of the school.