And a golden haze came in the morning and at sunset.
The mystery, the still power, and the vague melancholy of autumn, crept through the veins of the Hampton girls, and they walked and picnicked on Leeds rocks, and sang away the glorious afternoons far into the twilight, when the sudden coolness warned them of what they would forget—that these days were going, and that winter would soon be upon them.
Peggy and Katherine saw their first autumn at college dissolving in that golden haze almost before they had begun to enjoy it and to realize that all this was really theirs—this life among seventeen hundred girls, all young, all having identical interests, all happy and congenial.
There came a Saturday afternoon too lovely to be spent at home.
“What shall we do to-day, Katherine?” Peggy asked. “Let’s just go somewhere by ourselves. Do you want to drive, or walk, or have a bacon bat or take some books down by Paradise and read?”
A day like that one suggests many ways for enjoyment, but if there is one thing more absolutely satisfying than another, and just-the-thing-to-do on such a Saturday afternoon, it is to tramp over to the cider mill, with a jug and a capacity-appetite for new cider and ginger cookies.
So it was inevitable that Peggy and Katherine should decide on this as the ideal adventure, after they had exhausted all the possibilities.
“That cider mill seems just as much a part of the college as Seelye Hall,” laughed Katherine. “Peggy, can’t you taste that wonderful cider now? Let’s go right away,—I think we can walk over and back, don’t you?”
That would mean about a nine-mile jaunt.
Somebody in the house had a gallon jug, and the room-mates promptly and unceremoniously “borrowed” this and, with silk sweater coats, and a ribbon tied around their heads to keep their hair from blowing, started off into the wonder of Indian summer, their hearts full of joy over every one of the nine miles that lay before them.