ning, and not giving me the least teeny weeny atom of a hint, even! I
wonder you could keep it in! The girls are pleased--most of them. Betty
says you're a sport, and Mabel King says she feels she's going to
worship you, and Nora Hyland said I was a lucker to have you for a
sister. Of course a few of them had plumped for Vivien, and let off
steam, but they'll soon get over it. Vivien looked like a thunder cloud.
She won't forgive you in a hurry! You may look out for squalls in her
quarter. Hallo, here's Rosemary come to meet us. I must tell her the
news. She knows already? Why, you said it was a secret! Well, you are
mean to have told Rosemary and not _me_! I'm not friends with you any
more, so there!"

Lorraine answered her sweet-faced elder sister's look of enquiry with a
nod of comprehension.

"Yes, it's all _un fait accompli_," she replied, "and on the whole I
think the school has borne it beautifully. Come along, Cuckoo, don't
pout! Rosemary must have some secrets I can't tell to the family baby.
Remember, you score in other ways. It's luck to be born youngest."

The three girls turned in at a gate and walked up a flower-bordered
drive to a comfortable ivy-covered house. "Pendlehurst" was a modern
house, and in Lorraine's opinion not at all romantic, but, with the
exception of herself, the Forrester family was not particularly given to
romance. Her father, in choosing a residence, had paid more attention to
drains, number of bedrooms and hot-water facilities than to artistic
beauty or aesthetic associations. He was a practical man with a bent
towards mathematics, and counted the cubic space necessary for the
requirements of seven children to be the matter of most importance. He
had an old-established practice as a solicitor in the town, and had
lived all his life at Porthkeverne. Of the large family of children only
the three youngest remained at home. Richard and Donald were at the
front, in the thick of the fighting; Rodney was in training for the Air
Force, while Rosemary, anxious also to flutter from the nest and try her
wings in the world, was to go to London to study singing at a College of
Music. Her term began a little later than Lorraine's, so the two girls
had still a few days left to spend together. They ran upstairs now to
their joint bedroom, where packing was in progress. A big box stood
under the window with a bottom layer of harmony-books and music tightly
arranged. To Rosemary it meant the fulfil