“I feel like the senior play committee,” said Madeline, as they began their conscientious tour, hoping against hope that they should find just the right thing lurking around some corner off Main Street. “We read all the impossible Elizabethan dramas that anybody could hear of, we hunted up Hindu plays, and made frantic efforts to hunt up Japanese ones; and some particularly earnest member even wrote a play herself. And all the time we knew as well as anything that Billy Shakespeare was our man.”
“Well, if that’s the way you feel about this, where, please, is our Billy Shakespeare?” inquired Babbie a trifle irritably.
Madeline smiled mysteriously. “We shall find him before the set of sun,” she declared oracularly. “I have a leading to that effect.”
“Couldn’t you make it before high noon, just as well?” sighed Babbie. “I’ve got on new shoes.”
Betty looked troubled. “Go home and rest, Babbie dear,” she begged. “Two of us can do this just as well as three.”
So Babbie went off, after a few polite protests, and Madeline and Betty finished up the cross-streets without seeing anything that could possibly be turned into a “stunty” tea-room.
“Well, can there be anything up nearer the college that we haven’t noticed?” asked Betty, trying to keep up the businesslike air appropriate to systematic research, but feeling very silly and completely discouraged.
“All boarding-houses, isn’t it, right down to the theatre?” said Madeline.
“Shall we go and look?” suggested Betty timidly. “I can’t quite remember what’s between the florist’s and that little white house that a crowd of juniors had last year.”
“Nothing,” returned Madeline promptly, as they started up the hill. “Don’t you know—there’s a wide lawn, and you go back across it to that big barn that the riding man had for his horses? He’s moving out, by the way. I met him yesterday, and he assured me that ’e missed them queer moon-lighters most hawfully. He’s going to move somewhere where he can have a big ring and some hurdles in a meadow. I’m afraid I rather led him to suppose”—Madeline looked properly conscience-stricken—“that we might be up this afternoon to have a lesson in jumping. But it looks as if we should be too busy.”