"Only more so," Bess Harley assured her. "Oh, Nan! consider what
they did to us when we came here for the first time last September.
'Member?"

Nan nodded with sudden gravity in her pretty face. She was not
likely to forget that trying time. She had been on a very different
footing with her schoolmates for the first few weeks of her life at
Lakeview Hall than she was now.

Rhoda Hammond, the new girl, seemed to apprehend something of this
change, for she said quickly and with much good sense:

"Well, if you two could stand it, and are evidently so much thought
of now, I'll grin and bear it, too. Though it isn't just as we are
taught to treat strangers out home. At Rose Ranch if a person is a
tenderfoot we try to make it particularly easy for him."

"Oh, my dear," drawled Bess, her eyes dancing, "it works just the
opposite at a girls' boarding school, believe me!"

Her chum, Nan, was for the moment not in a laughing mood. She could
scarcely realize now that she was the same Nan Sherwood who had
come so wonderingly and timidly to Lakeview Hall.

Of the Sherwoods there were only Nan and her father and mother.
They were an especially warmly attached trio and probably, if a
most wonderful and startling thing had not happened, Nan and Momsey
and Papa Sherwood would never have been separated, or been fairly
shaken out of their family existence, as they had been just about a
year before this present story opens.