The faces of the new girls appeared white and mournful, pressed against the dormitory windows, or flushed and laughing from between rubber helmets and slickers out on the campus, according to their dispositions.
Up and down the second floor corridor of Ambler House trooped the usual forenoon procession, umbrella tips clicking on the polished boards: those who were going out to classes making a flapping sound with their rubber garments, those returning giving out a sloshing noise that advertised the weather outside in an unfavorable manner.
Before several of the doors wet umbrellas were open on the floor to dry, while tiny rivulets trickled steadily from the steel prongs. They looked like big black bats which had flown in to seek shelter from the outer torrents and might be expected to take wing again at any minute.
It was not a hilarious atmosphere at best, but, to add to its dripping depression, two wails of a most long-drawn and lugubrious sort began to be wafted down the length of the hall over the tops of the wet umbrellas, drifting in heart-brokenly through the students’ doors, and dying away in receding cadences whenever a disconsolate head lifted itself from a cushion to listen or a helmet strap was shoved back from a surprised and inquisitive ear.
“M—MMm-MO-O-Oh,” went the wail, and then “Moo-oo-oo,” with a pastoral significance that was particularly mystifying.
No use for any girl to tell herself that this was the wind howling—or the rain dejectedly descending on a tin roof—for no wind ever howled so precisely up and down scales with such sobbingly human and barnyard notes, and no rain was ever known to be so surprisingly vocal, nor so loud and threatening one moment and so tremulously broken and far away the next.
“Go! Gug-gug-go! Gug-gug-GO-go-go!” screamed the dual wail, apparently expressive of the utmost suffering, and yet, through it all, maintaining a baffling rhythmical quality and a monotony of utterance that sent a shuddering wonder in its wake as it coursed down the hall.
But during such a disheartening season as Freshman Rains the spirit of investigation is not keen, and the residents on the second floor preferred to distract their attention by lessons that must be learned or by long and rambling letters home that ended with vague hints that somebody in their house was being killed down the hall.
It was not until the voices broke out into wild and mirthless laughter that their apathetic spirits were aroused to protest.
“Goodness, girls, what’s that awful noise?” an indignant brown head poked itself out from one of the umbrella-guarded doors and sent its peevish remonstrance down the corridor. In an instant every door framed a face—or two faces—and a babble of questions was echoed back and forth.