After the teacher left the girls gave full vent to their choking sensations. Tavia rolled off the couch, Edna covered her own head in Dorothy’s best sofa cushion, Cologne drank a glass of water that Tavia intended to drink, and altogether things were brisk in Number Nineteen.
“We might as well have it over with,” Edna said, patting the sofa cushion into shape. “I’ll confess to the finding of the plaguey thing.”
“Come on then,” ordered Dorothy, and the others meekly followed her into the hall.
They were but one flight up, and as they looked over the banister they saw below Miss Mingle, Mrs. Pangborn and several others.
“Oh!” gasped Tavia, “they are sprouting pin feathers!”
“Young ladies!” cried Mrs. Pangborn. “What does this mean?”
They trooped down. But before they reached the actual scene of the befeathered hall, a messenger was standing beside Miss Mingle, and the music teacher was reading a telegram.
“I must leave at once!” she said. “Please, Mrs. Pangborn, excuse the young ladies! Come with me to the office! I must arrange everything at once! I have to get the evening train!”
“You must go at once?” queried the head of the school, in some surprise.
“Yes! yes! instantly! Oh, this is awful!” groaned the music teacher. “Come, please do!” And she hurried off, and Mrs. Pangborn went after her.
“Just luck!” whispered Tavia, as she scampered after the others, who quickly hurried to more comfortable quarters. “But what do you suppose ails Mingle?”
“Maybe someone proposed to her,” suggested Edna, “and she was afraid he might relent.”
But little did Dorothy and her chums think how important the message to the teacher would prove to be to themselves, before the close of the Christmas holidays.
CHAPTER II
GOING HOME
“Did you ever see anything so dandy?” asked Tavia. “I think we girls should subscribe to the telegraph company. There is nothing like a quick call to get us out of a scrape.”
“Don’t boast, we are not away yet,” returned Dorothy.
“But I would like to see anything stop me now,” argued Tavia. “There’s the trunk and there’s the grip. Now a railroad ticket to Dalton – dear old Dalton! Doro, I wish you were coming to see the snow on Lenty Lane. It makes the place look grand.”
“Lenty Lane was always pretty,” corrected Dorothy. “I have very pleasant remembrances of the place.”
The girls were at the railroad station, waiting for the train that was to take them away from school for the holidays. There were laughter and merry shouts, promises to write, to send cards, and to do no end of “remembering.”
And, while this is going on, and while the girls are so occupied in this that they are not likely to do anything else, I will take just a few moments to tell my new readers something about the characters in this story.
The first book of this series was called “Dorothy Dale; A Girl of To-Day,” and in that, Dorothy, of course, made her bow. She was the daughter of Major Dale, of Dalton, and, though without a mother, she had two loving brothers, Joe and Roger. Besides these she had a very dear friend in Tavia Travers, and Tavia, when she was not doing or saying one thing, was doing or saying another – in brief, Tavia was a character.
In the tale is told how Dorothy learned of the unlawful detention of a poor little girl, and how she and Tavia took Nellie away from a life of misery.
“Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School,” my second volume, told how our heroine made her appearance at boarding school, where she spent so many happy days, and where she still is when the present story opens. And as for Tavia, she went, too, thanks to the good offices of some of her chum’s friends.
Glenwood School was a peculiar place in many ways, and for a time Dorothy was not happy there, owing to the many cliques and mutual jealousies. But the good sense of Dorothy, and some of the madcap pranks of Tavia, worked out to a good end.
There is really a mystery in my third volume – that entitled “Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret.” It was almost more than Dorothy could bear, at first, especially as it concerned her friend Tavia. For Tavia acted very rashly, to say the least. But Dorothy did not desert her, and how she saved Tavia from herself is fully related.
When Dorothy got on the trail of the gypsies, in the fourth book of the series, called “Dorothy Dale and Her Chums,” she little dreamed where the matter would end. Startling, and almost weird, were her experiences when she met the strange “Queen,” who seemed so sad, and yet who held such power over her wandering people. Here again Dorothy’s good sense came to her aid, and she was able to find a way out of her trouble.
One naturally imagined holidays are times of gladness and joy, but in “Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays,” which is the fifth book of this line, her vacation was “queer” indeed. How she and her friends, the boys as well as the girls, solved the mystery of the old “castle”, and how they saved an unfortunate man from danger and despair, is fully set forth. And, as a matter of fact, before the adventure in the “castle” came to an end, Dorothy and her friends themselves were very glad to be rescued.
Mistaken identity is the main theme of the sixth volume, called “Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days.” To be taken for a demented girl, forced to go to a sanitarium, to escape, and to find the same girl for whom she was mistaken, was part of what Dorothy endured.
And yet, with all her troubles, which were not small, Dorothy did not regret them at the end, for they were the means of bringing good to many people. The joyous conclusion, when the girl recovered her reason, more than made up for all Dorothy suffered.
Certainly, after all she had gone through, our heroine might be expected to be entitled to some rest. But events crowded thick and fast on Dorothy. On her return to Glenwood, after a vacation, she found two factions in the school.
Just who was on each side, and the part Dorothy played, may be learned by reading the seventh book of this series, called “Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals.” There was rivalry, none the less bitter because “sweet girl graduates” were the personages involved. But, in the end, all came out well, though at one time it looked as though there would be serious difficulties.
Of course many more characters than Dorothy and Tavia played their parts in the stories. There were Ned and Nat, the sons of Mrs. White, Dorothy’s aunt, with whom, after some years spent in Dalton, Dorothy and her father and brothers went to live, in North Birchlands. Tavia was a frequent visitor there, and Tavia and the good-looking boy cousins – well, perhaps you had better find out that part for yourself.
Dorothy was always making friends, and, once she had made them she never lost them. Not that Tavia did not do the same, but she was a girl so fond of doing the unexpected, so ready to cause a laugh, even if at herself, that many persons did not quite know how to take her.
With Dorothy it was different. Her sweet winsomeness was a charm never absent. Yet she could strike fire, too, when the occasion called for it.
And so now, in beginning this new book, we find our friends ready to leave the “Glen”, as they called it; leave the school and the teachers under whose charge they had been for some time.
Leaving Glenwood was, as Dorothy said, very different from going there. One week before Christmas the place was placed in the hands of the house-cleaners, and the pupils were scattered about over the earth.
Dorothy and Tavia were together in the chair car of the train; and Dorothy, having gathered up her mail without opening it as she left the hall, now used her nail file to cut the envelopes, and then proceeded to see what was the news.
“Oh, Tavia!” she exclaimed, as she looked at the lavender paper that indicated a note from her Aunt