"I suppose that will be my job," said Violet plaintively. "It will be lots of fun standing out in a drafty hall looking for Amanda while you girls are having a feast."
"No, we'll fix it so it will be perfectly fair," said Billie soothingly. "We'll draw lots or something."
"But I don't know what good a guard would do anyway," said Laura dolefully. "There's something creepy about the way Amanda finds out things. You think she's miles away and the next day she tells you more about what you did than you know yourself."
"Maybe she has an accomplice," said Billie dramatically, and the girls giggled.
"Anybody'd think Amanda was a criminal or something," said Laura, but Billie shook her head decidedly.
"Uh-uh," she said. "I might like a good honest criminal but I'll be jiggered--scuse me, ladies--if I can like Amanda Peabody! She's too sly!"
It was just two weeks to the time when the girls were to leave for Three Towers Hall.
It seemed to them they would never get done all the things that they had to do, and they sewed and packed and planned until it seemed they must stop because of sheer exhaustion.
However, their parents sent them to bed early--and not without difficulty was this feat accomplished--on the night before the great day, and the morning found them refreshed and wildly eager for this new adventure.
As, in her own little room, Billie regarded her flushed reflection in the mirror it seemed impossible to make herself realize that she was really going to Three Towers Hall at last--Three Towers which had been the height of her ambition from the time she had entered the grammar school.
She was beginning to feel quite grown up--which was perhaps the reason she regarded her new and very pretty brown hat with a critical eye and smoothed down her new and very pretty brown dress with hands that trembled with excitement.
"Well, I think I'm all ready now," she said at last, and gave a little, half-frightened glance around the familiar room. She wondered how it would seem to sleep in a strange place with no mother or father near by.
Then she shook herself impatiently and picked up her bag--for was she not grown-up now?
However, she did not feel very grown-up when a moment later she met her mother in the hall and saw traces of tears on her face. For Mother had no new scenes to go to and the departure of her two noisy children would leave the house strangely quiet and subdued.