"My precious child," exclaimed Mrs. Lindsay, "I declare you have grown, and are ever so much fatter, and you've quite a colour too!" "School evidently agrees with you, Sylvia," said her father. "It's a good thing you went, isn't it?" "It was quite different from what I thought it would be," Sylvia confided to her mother when they sat in the drawing-room together for a long talk after tea. "Miss Kaye isn't cross, she's lovely and kind; and even Miss Arkwright isn't bad, and I like Marian better than I did, and I just love Linda and Mercy. I tried to explain about Mercy in my letters, but I'm afraid you didn't exactly understand, so I'll have to tell it you over again. And Marian and I were both bracketed together top, and Miss Arkwright said we must be friends and not rivals, and I quite forgot the middle of "John Gilpin", and made a horrible mistake in my Christmas piece; but Miss Kaye said I might tell you that she thought I had done very well, but my report will come in a day or two, so then you can see everything for yourself." Sylvia had a particularly happy holiday, and thought she enjoyed home twice as much with having been away from it for a whole term. Her father found time to label the specimens in her museum, and to show her how to develop her photographs and print them afterwards, and her mother gave up the afternoons specially to be with her. All her friends came to her New Year's party, and to her astonishment she found she got on perfectly well with the once-detested Fergusson boys, who now seemed hardly more lively than Connie or Stella Camden, and who did not tease her, since, as they described it, "she had left off putting on airs". Her experiences with the little ones at school made her quite motherly with Bab and Daisy Carson, and she enjoyed the games with Effie and May as much as they did. "You said you wouldn't care to run about when you came back," they reminded her, "but you play more with us now than you did before." "I believe Sylvia has learnt it as part of her lessons," said Aunt Louisa, who looked on with much approval, adding quietly to Mrs. Lindsay: "The child is immensely improved. She is brighter and stronger and better in every way. I was sure Miss Kaye would soon work a change, and I think we may feel that so far our experiment has been a complete success." CHAPTER XII The Secret Society