“It’s lovely, isn’t it!” exclaimed Arden Blake, resting her hand on Terry’s shoulder. “Such beautiful pines—so tall and——”
“Mysterious!” supplied Sim Westover, making a dive for her compact.
“Thank you. I was about to say—stately,” remarked Arden with assumed superciliousness. “And see the deer behind the bush, a stone deer, I suppose. But it’s all so lovely!”
“Lovely indeed,” agreed Terry as she was apt to do with anything Arden said or did. “Don’t you think so, Sim?”
Sim, occupying most of the back seat of the rickety station car, felt differently about it and said so. Sim was that way.
“It’s all very well,” she murmured, busy with her compact, “all very well, my good girls, but isn’t it about time we got inside the college? After a train trip like the one we have just endured, I’ll be glad to get my feet off Arden’s suitcase. Wherever did you get such a big one, Arden?”
“It was given to me when we all decided to come to Cedar Ridge. You’ll wish it was yours when you see what’s inside. Oh, look! That must be the swimming-pool building!” There could be no mistake about it as they could note when the harassed little flivver was slowly completing the half circle of the cinder drive which curved like a crescent moon in front of Cedar Ridge College, and was approaching a glass-roofed structure set somewhat apart from the other buildings.
The roof was dome-shaped, and its glass panes, set in frames of copper which glinted in the rays of the red autumn sun, were thick and green like petrified ocean waves.
As they rattled past the pool building they saw a wheelbarrow standing right in the pathway. Somehow that odd obstruction looked out of place near a natatorium, and Sim said so, adding:
“I wonder what’s the idea?”