“Yes, every girl has to be in her room at five-thirty so as to have plenty of time to dress for dinner at six. And the rule is partly to make it certain that we’ll be in before it’s very dark, too, I suppose.”
“Well, we’ll make a dive for it,” he said. He drew out his watch, and then his face grew red with that same brilliant over-color that it had worn when she first saw him out there in the whipping winds. This time it was not the wind that had sent that flame over his forehead, chin and cheeks,—it was shame that his sense of responsibility should not have warned him of the passing time.
“It’s—half-past five now,” he was obliged to tell her.
Peggy looked into his poor, miserable face, full of self-accusation, and with an effort of will she drew her own lips into their best smile.
“Oh, well,” she said, “we’ve had a gorgeous time, and a few short hours ago I didn’t expect ever to see another half-past five in all this world. I guess having one’s life saved will be sufficient cause for delay to appease Mrs. Forest. I imagine even she can get the importance of that.”
But in her heart she knew just about how easy it was to explain things to Mrs. Forest—about as easy as moving a mountain. Once the principal decided in favor of punishment, not all the king’s horses or all the king’s men could change her mind. And, oddly enough, it was the small faults that she scored most heavily. Peggy sometimes felt that a girl might steal something and yet not arouse Mrs. Forest’s wrath as thoroughly as one who was late to dinner.
“You are to be trained in manners in my school,” she often said, and it was true that with her these seemed to come before everything else. She was not so strict in regard to chaperonage and all that as the New York finishing schools; she had no need to be. The school was situated in a small and desirable town, and among her pupils were none of the vapid little Miss Foolishnesses sometimes sent away to school because their parents or guardians can’t manage them at home. All her students were bright, eager, typical American girls like Peggy and Katherine and Florence, most of whom had a definite idea and plan for their lives after graduation, the majority trending collegeward. So, although Peggy was the youngest girl who would receive a diploma next June, it would not be on the score of lack of chaperonage in going to tea with a young Amherst friend that she would meet with Mrs. Forest’s objection, but merely on the technical ground of not returning at the exactly appointed time.
Hastily he shook out her sweater and held it for her, then flung into his own, and jammed his cap on his head, and catching up the puppy that all this while had been lying comfortably before the fire he held the door open for her. The storm blew in to meet them as they stood there, and with a shiver of determination they strapped on their snow-shoes and struck out. “We’ll just go over to the next corner, where we can get a street car—we’re only a little way from Andrews by car line,” the boy told her.
They were fortunate enough to catch a car at once, and all unconscious of the friendly stares of the passengers they congratulated each other on having left the tea room at exactly the right moment.
The car stopped directly in front of the Andrews gate. Their cheeks were aglow and their minds full of the afternoon’s adventures rather than with their consequences. On the wide porch Peggy turned to her friend and said, “You must go, now, and be introduced to Mrs. Forest at some other time. They’re at dinner now, and she’d kill me with her own hands if I call her away. So I’ll let you go and just say, ‘Thank you, and I’ve had a nice time’—”