After dinner, Lorraine Hamilton and the Hart girls joined them in the parlour. But after chatting for a few moments with them, Patty declared she must go back to her studies.
“It’s awfully hard,” she said to Lorraine, as they walked to school next morning, “to settle down to work after having such a gay vacation. I do believe, Lorraine, that I never was intended for a student.”
“You’re doing too much,” said Lorraine. “It’s perfectly silly of you, Patty, to try to cram two years’ work into one, the way you’re doing.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Patty, “because then I won’t have to go to school next year, and that will be worth all this hard work now.”
“I’m awfully sorry you’re going away from The Wilberforce,” said Lorraine. “I shall miss you terribly.”
“I know it, and I’ll miss you, too; but Seventy-second Street isn’t very far away, and you must come to see me often.”
The schoolgirls all welcomed Patty back, for she was a general favourite, and foremost in all the recreations and pleasures, as well as the classes of the Oliphant school.
“Oh, Patty,” cried Elise Farrington, as she met her in the cloakroom, “what do you think? We’re going to get up a play for commencement. An original play, and act it ourselves, and we want you to write it, and act in it, and stage-manage it, and all. Will you, Patty?”
“Of course I will,” said Patty. “That is, I’ll help. I won’t write it all alone, nor act it all by myself, either. I don’t suppose it’s to be a monologue, is it?”
“No,” said Elise, laughing. “We’re all to be in it, and of course we’ll all help write it, but you must be at the head of it, and see that it all goes on properly.”