The next day Gladys Merle received a letter from her mother in Chicago stating that her father had gone to Buffalo on business and would drop in at Linden Hall and pay her a call. Gladys was alone in her room when she read this letter, which was lucky, for her uncontrolled anger and grief were so great that she threw herself down on the bed and sobbed.

“I’ll be disgraced forever if Pa comes here,” she thought, “after all I’ve said about his handsome looks. But he shan’t come! When he telephones, I’ll tell him that I would rather meet him in Buffalo.”

Because of her tear-swollen face, Gladys Merle did not go down to the library for the “hour of politeness.” It might have been better for her peace of mind if she had been there. Miss Merritt had been drilling the girls in graceful curtsies and they were just resting in groups, when, at the open front door there appeared a short, stout, red-faced man who was smiling affably. To the amazement of the girls, he walked into the room without ceremony.

“This here is the young ladies’ boarding-school, ain’t it?” he asked genially of Janet Nagel, who happened to be nearest.

“Is my gal anywhere handy? I dropped in to surprise her sort of, though her ma did write that I’d be hikin’ around this way.”

Miss Merritt stepped up to the stranger and said kindly, “If you will tell me the name of your daughter, I will have her called.”

“My gal is Gladys Jones,” the father said proudly. He did not notice the murmur of amazement, nor would he have understood it, but in that moment Gladys Merle lost her following.

A maid was sent to call the girl, but she pleaded illness, and asked that her father be permitted to come to her. What happened, even the girls in her own clique never knew, but for hours after Mr. Jones had left, a puzzled and saddened man, Gladys Merle refused to leave her room. She was sure that all the pupils would be laughing at her and she determined that she would not remain in that school another day. She would pack her trunk and leave the very next morning for her home. She had told an untruth. She had said that her father was stately and handsome, when all the time she knew, only too well, that he was merely an uneducated ranchman. True, he had great wealth, but Gladys Merle had been learning in the last few days that the girls of Linden Hall did not have the respect for riches that she had supposed they would have. She was still feeling humiliated from the cool manner in which Adele Doring had treated her.

“I’ll pack my trunk this very minute and I’ll leave this school without facing a one of those horrid girls,” she thought, and springing up she pulled open her bureau drawers and was just about to take out an armful of clothing when there came a light rap on her door. Gladys Merle tossed her head. “I just won’t see anybody,” she thought. “I suppose it’s Janet Nagel come to taunt me, but she won’t get the chance, so she might as well go away.”

However, the rapping continued, and a sweet voice, which certainly was not Janet’s, was calling, “Gladys Merle, may I come in a moment, please?”

Out of curiosity Gladys opened the door a crack. Then she stepped back in surprise, and her face flushed a deep crimson, for the girl standing without was no other than Carol Lorens.

Only a few moments before Janet Nagel had told Carol the whole story and that kind girl felt sorry indeed for Gladys and decided to call on her and see if she could not help her in some way. “May I come in?” Carol repeated pleasantly.

Gladys Merle’s first impulse was to slam the door but instead, she heard herself saying, “Oh, come in if you want to. I’ve been so humiliated I don’t care about anything.”

Then, flinging herself on the bed, she sobbed and sobbed. Carol closed the door and went to the bedside as she said kindly, “I know that I am a stranger to you, Gladys, but my mother has so often told me how to find the silver lining of each trouble that comes, I thought perhaps I might help you.”

“There isn’t any help out of my trouble,” Gladys Merle sobbed afresh. “I’ve been a silly, that’s what! I told the girls that my father was stately and handsome, and he isn’t, he’s as backwoodsy as he can be, but he had no right to come to the school and humiliate me.”

“I saw your father,” Carol said, “and I liked his honest face and the merry twinkle in his kind blue eyes, and if you are better educated than he is, remember that it is your father to whom you owe it. My great-grandfather, Gladys, had a royal title offered to him by the king of England, but he refused it, saying that he would rather remain simply a minister of the gospel and a gentleman. There is a book down in the library called ‘The Making of Royalty,’ that tells all about it, and my name is in it as being the youngest member of the American branch of the family of Lorens. I was the youngest member then, but now there are the twins.”

Gladys Merle gasped. To think that she had been trying to snub a girl whose ancestor might have been royalty and wouldn’t.

An hour later the pupils of Linden Hall Seminary were amazed to see Gladys Merle Jones and Carol Lorens enter the dining-room together.

The next morning Gladys telephoned to Buffalo and asked her father if she might come up and spend the day with him.

Mr. Jones was overjoyed and decided that a headache had been the cause of the outburst of the day before.

After that the young ladies of Linden Hall heard no more about Gladys Merle’s great wealth.