“I say, ain’t you folks goin’ home till mornin’?” shouted a jovial stage-hand, thrusting his head out from the wings.
The crowd laughed and cheered him, then cheered everybody and went home, singing to Roberta all the way up the hill.
“But you can’t blame them,” said Betty Wales. “They don’t realize how tired we are, and it’s something pretty exciting to have given the play that Miss Ferris and Mr. Masters both say is the best yet.”
“And to have had a perfectly marvelous Shylock,” added Kate Denise warmly.
“And a splendid Portia,” put in Roberta.
“Oh, wise young judges, please don’t forget to mention Gratiano,” said Katherine Kittredge, and set them all to laughing.
“It’s been splendid fun,” said Barbara. “Don’t you wish we could give it all over again?”
Then they sat down on the green knolls and the gondolas and Portia’s best carved chairs, and talked and talked, until, as Babbie said, they all felt so proud of themselves and each other and 19— that the stage wouldn’t hold them. Whereupon they remembered that to-morrow was Baccalaureate Sunday and that most of their families had inconsiderately invited them out to breakfast,—two facts which made it desirable to go home and to bed as speedily as possible.
It always rains in the morning of Baccalaureate Sunday, but it generally clears up in time for the service, which is in the afternoon; and even if it doesn’t the graduating class and its friends are willing to make the best of a bad matter because it would have been so much worse if the rain had waited for Ivy Day. 19—’s Baccalaureate was showery in an accommodating fashion that permitted the class to sleep late in the morning because their families wouldn’t want them to go out in the rain, and cleared off just before and just after the service, so that they didn’t need the carriages that they couldn’t possibly have gotten, no matter how it poured.
And it cleared off for Ivy Day. Helen Adams was up at five o’clock anxiously inspecting the watery sunshine to see if it would last.