"She didn't," Allyn objected suddenly. "The chicken didn't come out any. I watched to see it, and I couldn't, and papa said so, too, and that's what made her so wretchable."
"But it's over, as Teddy says," Hope observed, breaking in on the laugh that followed Allyn's contribution to medical science; "and I can't help feeling that we are going to have a lovely winter, with Archie here, and Billy to stay on till Thanksgiving. There's time to make up for all we've lost now."
"We'll make the most of it, then, for this will be my last winter here, for ever so long," Billy said, rising. "If I enter college, next fall, it will be a good while before I settle down at home again."
"And I too," Theodora added, as she rose and stood beside him.
He smiled down into her eyes for a moment, as they stood there. Then together they turned and walked away. The world about them lay golden in the sunlight and in the glow reflected back from the yellow leaves of the hickories; but not one whit less golden was the future, as it stretched away and away before their glad young eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was commencement week at Smith College. To the alumna and the student, the picture called up by those words is sufficiently definite and demands no amplification. To them, is no prettier sight possible than the broad campus dotted with buildings, and the knots of daintily-dressed girls moving slowly to and fro along the winding paths. The Meadow City always puts on her most festal array in honor of the occasion; the very heavens seem to watch for that week, and to provide for it the finest moon of the whole summer.
Baccalaureate was over, and, early Monday evening, groups were already gathering on the campus at the rear of College Hall, eager to secure comfortable places for the glee club concert. It was one of the charming pictures of the year, that concert, the cluster of girls on the steps facing the long rows of well-filled benches below. Beyond the benches, and extending far across the grass to the very steps of the old Dewey House, was a moving, shifting crowd, changing in form and color, as the brightly-dressed girls came and went, like the varying slides of a kaleidoscope. Back of the glee club, again, the open windows of the reading-room were filled with faces of old graduates who knew the place, and who chose this point of vantage either to protect their gowns and their elderly necks from the dampness outside, or to use their position facing the crowd to discover returning classmates whom they had missed in the throng.
"There's the class president," one of them said to a friend who had arrived, only that afternoon.