The end of the school year was rapidly approaching, and there was a great deal of work to be done. Ernestine and Winnie were both anxious to do honor to their school and to the teachers who had worked with them hard and patiently, so every minute was occupied in some way, and Ernestine had no time for unhealthy grieving.
On Saturday afternoons Fannie and Miriam and Gretta came to Mrs. Burton's, and they all went over the week's work together. Sometimes Mr. Allen and Fannie came and took Winnifred and Ernestine for a drive through the beautiful suburbs, and one evening they had another row on the river with Uncle Fred and Aunt Kitty.
And so the weeks wore away and brought the bright June day when they all walked together to the high-school to take their examination seats. Their hearts beat high with hope and courage, and swelled with self-importance not altogether to be made light of; for it had been their aim for many months to gain this last fight of their school year on the very field on which they would plant their banners of occupation if they won. And win they felt sure they would, for this was but the supreme test to prove the force and earnestness of what had gone before.
"On, on to victory!" laughed Miriam each morning, waving her hands high above her head. And "On, on to victory!" laughed the four other girls, echoing her cry.
How they worked that week, their young heads bent over their papers, while their young eyes carefully perused those wonderful "printed questions"! The five, so different in manner, but so alike in aim and purpose—Ernestine, calm, deliberate, direct; Fannie, thoughtful but rapid; Gretta, neat, painstaking, and a little anxious; Miriam, dashing ahead impulsively, scratching out a word here or inserting one there, doing twice to thinking once, but thinking that once well; and Winnie, absorbed, thorough and confident—were noted with interest by the stranger teachers watching them, for they had learned to work with a definite aim which showed itself in their very attitudes.
They took the questions home with them, and each day the five might be seen at the home of one or the other, again going over the work, replying one at a time and sometimes all at once to the oft-repeated query, "How did you answer this?" or "Did you prove that?"
Sometimes the group was joined by one or more of their other classmates, and once Josie Thompson, wearing her brightest dress and biggest pin, called to them as she passed: "Isn't this a horrid old examination? I know I won't pass, and I don't care if I don't. My mother says if I fail she'll take me out of school, and I'll be glad of it. I can't see any fun in digging every minute, and what's the use of all this high-school stuff anyhow! I can have a better time without it."
And on the last day she waved her hands to them across the street and shouted: "Good-by, girls! I know it's all up with me!"
"Poor Josie!" said Ernestine, after they had gone home; "trying so hard to have a good time, and missing it after all."
"Yes," said Mrs. Burton, laying her hand gently on the girl's head, "like the dog in the fable, she is losing the substance to grasp at the shadow."