So she rose an hour earlier every morning, and quietly took upon herself more of the burden of household duties, turning them off so dexterously that Lucy Waring, who had failed perceptibly in the past year, accepted the relief almost unconsciously, and even Miss Sophia had no open fault to find.
“If I could only please Miss Sophia,” grieved Yellow Star. “But I know I never can, for I can’t change myself into something else. She dislikes me because I am Indian,” was the unspoken thought, and it cut deep.
When September came round, Stella entered the old academy with Doris and Cynthia and the rest, and found a new and absorbing world opening before her. Laurel academy was an endowed school, and a really good one, with better-paid teachers and more up-to-date equipment than the little town could have provided out of its own slender resources.
Ethan had been duly graduated and was going away to college, where for two or three momentous years the girls were seldom to see him, since he was “working his way through,” and found it necessary to devote the long vacations to more paying, though not half so pleasant things as doing “chores” for kind old Uncle Si.
The girls had now fairly entered upon a period of life in which boys cease to be “horrid things,” and girls are no longer considered “too silly for anything,” and it soon became evident that, of the three friends, Doris was by far the most mature socially. She was undoubtedly a pretty girl, with big blue eyes, fascinating hair of an amber tint, and a skin like a rose-leaf—a belle and a flirt in her demure, village fashion long before her sixteenth birthday.
Cynthia, to her languid mother’s discontent, but her father’s secret satisfaction, was at the same age a long-limbed, lanky, boyish-looking girl, with decidedly boyish manners, and only the frankest and least flattering interest in the ruder sex. As for Stella, the country youths admired her from a distance, while she, for her part, had no time for them.
“I do despise long skirts; they get in your way so!” Sin complained, as the three were scaling a friendly stone wall on a pleasant Saturday in the following spring, taking their favorite “short cut” to Wolcott’s Woods.