“Oh, rather! at least someone else did, and she was killing. ‘I simply love them!’ she said, and looked all round as though a big helping would at once appear! I say, she’s a jolly little thing, isn’t she? And with those legs she should be a good runner, too. I wonder how she’ll shape for hockey.”
“Do you play hockey here?” ventured Gretta. “I mean, shall we?”
“Rath-er!” declared her friend. “We’d a ripping match here on our ground, last day of last term. Top-hole! Pity you couldn’t have seen some of Helen’s strokes. And all the team played well, Miss Carter said. We beat the Lees girls hollow. But it’s hockey this term, too, of course, so——”
The last sentence was interrupted by the ringing of a deep-toned tea-bell, at the first sound of which, as if by magic again, silence fell on the entire group, and, in an orderly file, they marched quietly along the passage into a large room at its farthest end.
Here two long tables were spread. At the head of one of them stood Miss Read, and nurse, still resplendent in cap and apron, was busy pouring out cups of tea at the second.
Then, in less time and with less noise than Gretta would have imagined possible, the girls seated themselves in their respective places, and the meal began; she, herself, at Miss Read’s direction, having found a place between Margot and Josy. Sybil was at nurse’s table, seated on the left-hand side of that dignitary, of whom she seemed very much in awe. Conversation, spirited enough, if not so loud as that carried on in the sitting-room, began again at once, and Gretta, after several plates had passed rapidly on their way up the table, found herself in possession of a liberal helping of the said scrambled eggs, and—a very good appetite!
CHAPTER V
RULES
“ARE they ‘cooked all wrong, or cold, or anything?’” asked Josy mischievously from Gretta’s right-hand side.
“No, they’re very nice,” said her table-companion, determined not to show she minded being teased. “Margot”—turning to her cousin, who sat eating bread-and-butter, and wearing an unusually solemn expression—“how do you like everything? What girls have you talked to?”
“I’m not so sure that I like it at all,” said Margot decidedly, looking very pink, and setting her chin rather obstinately. “I’ve been talking to a girl called Stella, and it seems as though we’re simply going to be cooped up! Sitting in lines, you know, and doing everything at the proper time! It doesn’t seem——”