The Little Colonel at Boarding-School

by Annie F. Johnston

The memory of it would be something to be glad for always, Betty thought, as she danced into the long drawing-room after Lloyd, and saw the old Colonel start up from his chair before the fire and come forward to meet them, the candle-light falling softly on his silver hair and smiling face.

Although Betty had laid aside her unfinished romance of Gladys and Eugene, she could no more help writing than a fish can keep from swimming, and that is why her Good Times book held so many interesting pages. All the energy and time that would have been put into the silly little novel went instead to the description of real scenes and real people, which in after years made the little white books the most precious volumes in all her library. As fast as one was filled she began another. The one now on her desk had the number IV. stamped in gold on the white kid cover, under her initials.

There were few pages in this fourth volume more interesting than the ones she found time to write on Christmas Eve. She had gone with Lloyd and Allison and Kitty that afternoon in search for Christmas greens with which to decorate the house.

Malcolm and Keith Maclntyre, Rob Moore, and Ranald Walton had met them in Tanglewood, their guns over their shoulders, and had joined them in their quest. The mistletoe they wanted grew too high to be climbed for or to be dislodged by throwing at, but Ranald, an expert marksman, volunteered to shoot down all they could carry. He was just home from military school on his vacation, and Rob Moore had been out for two days hunting with him. Malcolm and Keith had been at their grandmother's several days, tramping long distances over the frosty fields, and coming in well satisfied each evening with the contents of their game-bags.

Malcolm and Rob were to leave for the same college-preparatory school after the holidays, and as they were going back to town on the five o'clock train they had but a short time left to spend in the Valley. So the party, after some discussion, divided into three groups, agreeing to meet at the depot.

Ranald strode away across the woods as fast as his long legs would carry him to the trees where the mistletoe hung. Kitty and Katie kept close in his wake, swinging the baskets between them that he was to fill. Keith and Betty hurried on to the place where the bittersweet grew thickest, while Rob and Allison, Malcolm and Lloyd strolled along, filling their baskets from the occasional trees of hemlock, spruce, and cedar they found on their way among the bare oaks and beeches. Now and then they found a pine with the brown cones clinging to the spicy boughs.

Only Betty's part of that quest is in the little white record; how they ran along through Tanglewood that afternoon, she and Keith, in the late December sunshine, breathing in the woodsy odour of the fallen leaves and the crisp frostiness of the air, until the blood tingled in their finger-tips and their cheeks grew red as rosy apples.

It was a pretty picture she left on the page, of the winter woods, of the old stile leading into the adjoining churchyard, where in almost a thicket of bare dogwood-trees and lilac-bushes stood the little Episcopal church, built like the one next the manse, of picturesque gray stone. The walls were aglow with the brilliant red and orange berries of the bittersweet, which hung even from the eaves and cornices, and from every place where the graceful vines could trail and twist and clamber.

Lloyd kept no record of that afternoon, but she never forgot it. She walked along, her eyes shining like stars, her cheeks glowing. Her dark blue cap and jacket made her hair seem all the fairer by contrast, and there was a glint of gold in it, wherever the sun touched it through the trees.

Rob and Malcolm were full of their plans for the coming term, and talked of little else all the way through the woods, but as they reached the stile, over which Keith and Betty had passed some time before, Rob exclaimed: