“Oh, yes, let’s have them,” said Marie, who felt the responsibilities of a hostess.
“Let’s,” said Emily, our silent member.
“I won’t!” asseverated Tony, battling heroically for a lost cause. “I won’t have anything to do with the treat, if you let Viola in.”
“Then don’t!” retorted Elizabeth, now sure of victory, and scornful of further dispute.
Tony turned her back upon her venal friends, and marched off to another group of girls. There was no great novelty about this proceeding, but the imminence of the congé lent it an unwonted seriousness.
“Don’t you suppose she’ll play cache cache with us?” asked Marie somewhat ruefully, and well aware of what we should lose if she did not.
“Of course she will,” said Elizabeth, “because she can’t play without us.”
And Elizabeth was right. Before the first of June, Tony had “come round;” being persuaded to this condescension by Lilly the peacemaker. Every cluster of friends should look to it that there is one absolutely sweet-tempered person in the group. But one is enough.
The first glorious thing about a congé was that we got up at seven instead of at quarter-past six, and the next was that we began to talk before we were out of our beds. Breakfast was so hilarious that only the fear of wasting our precious hours ever dragged us from the refectory, and up into the schoolroom, to prepare for the special feature of the day, cache cache. We never played cache cache except upon a holiday, which was why it seemed such a thrilling and wonderful game. No indulgence was likely to lose its value for us through unwarranted repetition. Two captains were chosen by acclamation, and they in turn elected their girls, picking them out alternately, one by one, until the whole Second Cours was divided into two bands of about twenty each. One band remained shut up in a music room (which was goal) for half an hour, while the other betook itself to the most secret and inaccessible spot that could be thought of as a hiding place. The captain might stay with her band, and direct its action, or she might be hidden separately; but no one except the captain was permitted to stray from the ranks for purposes of reconnoitring. The same rule held good for the searching party. The captain alone might play the scout. The rest were obliged to hold together. The capture of the hidden captain counted as half the game. The capture of the hidden band, before it could reach its goal, counted as the other half of the game. Thus the hiders were forced either to dispense with the invaluable services of their leader, or to risk the loss of the whole game, if she were surprised in their company. So much, indeed, depended upon the leader’s tactics, and so keen was our thirst for victory, that the girl who saved the day for herself and for her comrades was held in higher esteem than the girl who came out ahead in the periodical blistering of examinations. College valuations are, perhaps, not so absolutely modern as they seem.
Given an area of over a hundred acres, with woods and orchards, with a deep ravine choked with tangled underbrush for concealment, and with wide lawns for an open run,—and cache cache becomes, or at least it became for us, a glorious and satisfying sport. To crouch breathless in the “poisonous valley” (there was a touch of poetry in all our nomenclature), to skirt cautiously the marshy ground of La Salette (named after the miraculous spring of Dauphiné), to crawl on one’s stomach behind half a mile of inadequate hedge, to make a wild dash for goal within full view of the pursuing party,—these things supplied all the trepidation and fatigue, all the opportunities for generalship, and all the openings for dispute, that reasonable children could demand. We hardly needed the additional excitement provided by Eloise Didier’s slipping into the marsh, and being fished out, a compact cake of mud; or by Tony’s impiously hiding in the organ loft of the chapel, and being caught red-handed by Madame Duncan,—a nun whom, thank Heaven! it was possible, though difficult, to cajole.