"Humph! High time you were!" sniffed Diana behind.
At the door the Vicar was helping his wife into her cloak. He put it round her with quite a gallant little air, and offered her his arm as they stepped out into the starlight together.
"I hardly know you to-night, Sylvia. You excelled yourself!" he remarked.
"'Sylvia'!" Diana triumphed inwardly. "That's the first time I've ever heard him call her anything except 'Mother'. If I get married, I'll want my husband to call me 'Diana', even if I've a dozen children to be 'Mother' to! I guess Mrs. Fleming has hopped off the shelf to-day, and I just hope to goodness she'll never go back."
CHAPTER XII
Diana Breaks Out
Diana went back to school in the wildest and most rampageous of spirits. She felt that she just had to let off steam somehow. She seized Wendy's hand, tore with her to the very top of the house and down again, then careered along the corridor in such a mad, not to say noisy stampede, that Miss Todd issued from her study like a lion from its lair, and fixed the culprits with the full concentrated power of what the girls called her "scholastic eye".
"Winifred and Diana," she remarked in calm, measured tones, "if I have to remind you again about walking quietly in the passages, it will mean forty lines for you both, and I should be sorry to have to give punishments on the first day of term."