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Adelle was so surprised at being addressed, also at the foreign-looking girl who had spoken, that she did not answer, and the other continued with a smile on her singularly red lips, "I speak English ver ver badly!" "What is your name?" Adelle asked bluntly. "Diane Merelda," the girl said in a liquid tone. "What?" Adelle asked with puckered brows.
As his haçienda near Morelos was not safe on account of brigands, Señor Merelda had sent his wife and daughter abroad to join his sons, and so Diane had reached Herndon Hall by the way of Madrid, Paris, and New York, after a summer spent with relatives in Spain.
To be able to attract the attentions of agreeable young men like Carlos Merelda was another of the virtues of her magic lamp that she had never thought of before. Although she had no idea of taking Carlos's courtship seriously, she thought all the better of herself for this extra magnetism which her money gave her person.
"Dell's all right she's a good little kid." That summer she did not have to mope by herself in the empty Hall. The little Mexican carried her away for a long visit to her distant home. The trouble in Morelos had temporarily subsided, so that Señor Merelda felt that it was safe to gather his large family at the haçienda. The journey, which the two girls made alone as far as St.
Instead of one "queer" person to whom she had become accustomed, there were half a dozen odd human beings in the persons of Señor and Señora Merelda and the older boys and girls. They all spoke all the time as did Diane, about everything and nothing. They seemed to care warmly for one another, yet quarreled like children over nothings.
Eveline Glynn "took her up" this year, and quite replaced the gentler Diane Merelda in her affections. There was if anything less study this year than before. The older girls scouted the idea of studying anything. Most of them expected to leave school forever the next spring and under the auspices of their mothers to enter the marriage game.
She could not understand the girl's foreign name, and so the little Mexican had written it out in pencil, "Diane Merelda," and underneath she wrote in tiny letters, "F. de M." "What do those mean?" Adelle had demanded, pointing to the mysterious letters. "Fille de Marie," the little Catholic lisped, and translated, "Daughter of the Blessed Virgin; you understand?"
As yet it had not made her unpleasant, merely given her a little needed confidence in her own being. She chose to make the long journey homewards by water from Vera Cruz to New York in charge of the captain of the vessel. For Señor Merelda, after the harassing activities of political warfare and its pecuniary drains, did not feel able to send his daughter back to Herndon Hall.
Miss Diane Merelda, as she told Adelle Clark, was the daughter of a wealthy Mexican whose acquaintance with Americans had so liberalized him that he preferred to educate his children in the States and in schools not under Catholic control.
She learned that Diane had a brother in a school near St. Louis, another in a technical college, and still another now in Germany. The Merelda family seemed much scattered, but that did not disturb the little Mexican. "We shall all be back in Morelos sometime!" She added sweetly, "Perhaps you will come to Mexico with me, no?"
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