CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE C. E. P.
“Oh, girls, you never could guess what’s going to happen?” Adele Doring called as she whirled into the corner room where she found all of her friends from Sunnyside busy with their week’s mending.
“It must be something powerful exciting,” Rosamond Wright drawled as she dropped an ivory ball into the toe of her stocking, where a hole awaited darning.
“I know what I wish was going to happen,” little Betty Burd chimed in. “I wish Madame Deriby would say that we need not have final exams. It would be heaps pleasanter to be promoted without them.”
“Girls, do let Adele tell us about it,” Carol Lorens called. “I know by her shining eyes that it is something ever so nice.”
Adele sank down in the cushiony window-seat and looked around with a provokingly merry smile. She liked nothing better than to mystify her friends. “You may have three guesses,” she said.
“Tell us what letter it begins with,” Peggy Pierce suggested as she fitted a patch carefully on her laboratory apron where a hole had been burned during an experiment.
“Oh, um—let me see, it might begin with several letters,” Adele said. “Well, I’ll choose three, since there are three words in its name, and they are C. E. P.”
“C stands for circus,” chanted the irrepressible Betty Burd.
“Well, this C doesn’t,” Adele told her. “Starr looks as though she were about to see the light.”
“Closing exercises are only two weeks away,” that maiden replied as she sat thinking hard with threaded needle suspended in air. “Oh, I do believe that I have it! Might it not be a closing-exercise party?”
“Starr, you were well named! You are brighter than the shiniest constellation in the heavens,” Adele cried. “That’s it! Madame Deriby just told me that she had decided that we might have a party the night before we depart for our homes. We may invite our brothers and that will provide us with escorts to check our baggage and all that sort of thing on the railroad journey.”
“Oh, how nice!” Carol Lorens exclaimed. “I have so wanted you girls to meet my splendid brother Peter, and since Evelyn hasn’t a brother, I’ll share him with her.”
“Of course they don’t have to be brothers,” Adele declared. “We may invite any boy friend, Madame Deriby said, that our mothers would permit us at home to have for escorts.”
“No need to ask whom Adele will invite,” Peggy Pierce sang out to tease, but Adele was not like Rosamond. She did not resent Peggy’s nonsense.
“Of course you know,” she replied frankly, which spoiled the fun of teasing her. “His initials are D. B.”
“Would you leave your poor brother Jack out of the party?” Betty Burd inquired.
“No indeed!” Della replied as she glanced at the lassie next to her. “I was planning to ask Doris to invite Jack if she didn’t mind, since she hasn’t a brother of her own.”
“I wonder who’ll invite Bob!” Peggy began, but before she could say more, Bertha interrupted, “Why, I shall, of course, since he is my brother.” So Peggy didn’t have a chance to tease Rose that time.
One day soon after the party announcement, Adele stole into the library where several of her friends were doing reference work. She kept looking around as though she feared that she might be followed and her movements were so stealthy that the girls, who were supposed to be studying, were much mystified.
“Adele, you act like the villain in a moving-picture play creeping along that way,” Betty Burd said. “It gives me the shudders. What are you afraid of?”
“I’ve a secret,” Adele said, “and I don’t want Gertrude to hear it. She doesn’t know that I know. In fact, she doesn’t know that anybody knows, but I do know, and——”
“My dear Adele,” Carol Lorens exclaimed, rising and pretending to feel her friend’s pulse and forehead, “you don’t think that you are ill or crazy or any little thing like that, do you?”
Adele laughed merrily. “No, I honestly don’t believe that I am any crazier than usual, but truly, I have a secret to tell you, and I wanted to be sure that Gertrude wasn’t in the room, that’s why I stole in so still like. I thought that you were so engrossed in your studies, as Miss Sharpleigh says, that you would neither hear nor see.”
“Gertrude is not with us,” Evelyn declared, and then she added gaily, “If you really want to know where she is at this very moment, you have but to glance out of yonder window.”
Adele looked and saw a tall lassie standing deep in the daisies with her flock of very little girls trooping about her, their arms filled with the gold and white blossoms, but she also saw more than that.
“Look! Look, girls!” she cried excitedly. “What if it should be a budding romance?”
“Where? Where?” Rosamond called as she rushed to the window, followed by the others, who peered over toward the daisy meadow which bordered the school grounds on the highway.
They saw that a roadster had suddenly stopped, a good-looking lad had leaped out, and, with cap in hand, he was talking pleasantly to the youngest teacher. The little ones gathered close to her and listened with wide eyes. Then, with a merry laugh, the lad tossed the smallest high in the air, shook hands with Gertrude and was gone.
“Adele, I do believe that you are right,” Doris Drexel declared. “I think that maybe it is the tiniest pink bud of a romance.”
“Oh, girls,” Rosamond Wright said, as they returned to the reference table and their books, “wouldn’t this be a fine title for a love story, ‘The poor minister’s daughter weds a millionaire’?”
“‘Rosie the Romancer’ would be an equally good one,” Starr teased, “but, Adele, all of this time your secret has remained unrevealed. Of course we are brilliant enough to realize that it must be about Gertrude. Now, what about her?”
“Something ever so nice!” Adele replied. “The day of our C. E. P. is also Gertrude’s sixteenth birthday. I just happened to remember it; now can’t we have a surprise party for her inside of the big party for all of us, just like those Chinese boxes where there is one inside of the other.”
“Della, what fun that will be!” squealed Betty.
“Let’s do it!” Peggy declared.
“Well then, thumbs up, and all promise absolute secrecy,” Adele said.
“We promise,” came in merry chorus.
“Sh-h! Here comes Gertrude!” some one whispered, and a moment later, when that young lady entered the library, her friends, including Adele, seemed to be engrossed in their studies, and so she went away, little dreaming of the fun that they were planning.