"Of a lovely September afternoon just like this," answered Betty, dreamily, half-closing her eyes and drawing in the fragrance with a slow, deep breath. "Of long shadows on the lawn and the sunshine flickering down through the locust leaves like gold, just as it is doing now. Of Malcolm MacIntyre sitting over where you are, thrumming on his banjo, and of Keith and you and Lloyd and me all singing 'My Old Kentucky Home.' Is that what it makes you think of?"
"Yes, that and the chase we gave old Aunt Cindy. Wasn't she mad when I made off with that gingerbread! I can hear her old slipper soles yet, flopping down the path after me."
"How long ago that seems," mused Betty, "and yet it's only two years."
"It surely must be longer than that," exclaimed Rob.
"No, don't you remember, it was just after Lloyd's house party, when she was eleven and I was twelve. I went abroad that fall with Cousin Carl and Eugenia, and stayed with them a year. And I've only been living at Locust a year. Now I'm a little over fourteen and Lloyd's thirteen; so that just makes it."
"Thirteen yeahs and foah months exactly, if you're talking about me," said the Little Colonel, coming out on the porch with a plate in her hands. "I smelled the gingahbread, so I told Mom Beck I'd have to stop for refreshments, and she could finish packing by herself. I've piled everything on the bed that I thought I could possibly need at bo'ding-school, and that's neahly everything I own. One needs so many things going off from home this way. Have some?"
She passed the plate to each one, and then, sitting down on the top step beside it, helped herself to a slice of the hot, spicy cake.
"Oh, Rob, we're going to have such larks!" she began. "I've always wanted to go away to school, and have midnight suppahs and do the things you read about in stories. I've heard mothah talk about the funny things that happened at the seminary when she was a girl, till I was simply wild to go there, too. And now it seems too good to be true, that we are really going, and are to have the very same room that she had one term when grandfathah was away from home, and she boahded there in little old Lloydsboro Seminary just as we are going to do. There!" she added, ruefully, clapping her hand over her mouth. "I've gone and told you, and I intended to keep you guessing for an hou'ah. I knew you'd nevah think that we were going to stay right here in the Valley."
"Of course not," answered Rob. "You've been a day pupil at that old seminary for the last five years, ever since you started to school. I'd naturally suppose that when you packed up all you owned and started off to school you'd at least go out of the sight of your own chimney smoke. I don't see where the fun is coming in. I can't think of anything more stupid. Instead of tearing around the country on horseback after lessons, as you've always done, riding where you please, you'll have to take walks with a gang of other girls with a teacher at the head of the procession. It's great exercise, that, taking steps about an inch long and saying nothing but prunes and prisms."
"Don't you believe that's all!" cried Lloyd. "We'll have to take the walks, of co'se, but think of the time we'll have for basket-ball. We'll be able to play the Anchorage girls by Thanksgiving, and I couldn't have been on the team if I'd been only a day pupil."