“And the oars are just as hard to use as a paddle,” cried Katherine, who had just dropped one overboard. “Oh, thank you,—yes, we can manage it all right; yes, indeed, we’ve had our swimming test!” This last was to the boat-house boy who rescued the oar and who seemed overly concerned for their safe voyage.
“Paradise,” breathed Peggy softly, a little while later, as they drifted under the shade of the overhanging trees and looked up toward the glowing green campus and the bright and exotic botanical gardens of Hampton. “Only the river is named that—but it’s all paradise. Oh, Katherine, Katherine, I think we’ve had a happy year, don’t you?”
But Katherine was not inclined at the moment to be either poetical or retrospective. “Mercy!” she cried out sharply, “now I’ve caught my oar on a root!”
The bright days sped all too fast. A few walks around Hospital Hill, a climb up Mt. Tom, a number of evening street-car rides when the girls sat on the front seat outside the car just back of the motorman with the wind blowing through their hair, a jaunt or so to a distant tea-house, a drive behind one of the bony mares, a few negligible recitations and examinations—and—poof!—they were gone like smoke.
The freshmen were urged to gather up their belongings and hasten home as soon as possible so that the campus rooms would be vacant for that greatest drama of the spring soon to be staged at Hampton—the commencement exercises for the senior class.
“And you and I aren’t to see a bit of it,” grieved Peggy to her room-mate. “I suppose they are keeping it all a mystery from us until we get nearer it ourselves. Don’t forget to write to me often and often this summer, Kathie,—it seems strange I’m not going to see you for so long a time.”
“Yes, I’ll write, of course, child. I’ll miss you and I’ll miss Hamp, but I’ll be glad to be home for a while, at that. My mother wants me and so do the rest of the dear folks. I’m so eager to get there I don’t know what to do—and yet my eyes are all full of tears at leaving, at the same time.”
“Well, we ought to be laughing instead of crying—neither of us got any conditions or low grades except——”
“Now you needn’t remind me of that. I got that low grade in botany because I couldn’t draw, not because I didn’t know the lessons. It’s funny if you have to be an artist for every course——”
“Never mind, Kathie, I barely came out on the safe side of math. I’m going to have a bonfire of my trigonometry and my old higher algebra as soon as I get off the train at home. They shall never cause anybody else such misery.”