“You mean that night when she told us about the miser that lives there, whom no one sees, and whom everyone thinks is mad? You see, Sybil doesn’t know all that; she only saw the house from the train with us, and we all talked about it then—don’t you remember? It would be a jolly adventure, of course, but she’s too small to go alone. Would it be all right, do you think, if I went with her?”
“Why, Margot!” exclaimed Gretta, surveying her cousin with wide-open eyes.
“If she’s set on it, I mean; for the prize, you know; she asked me to come, and I said I’d think it over.”
“But Miss Read said we weren’t to, and it’s out of bounds, and—and——” Gretta was beginning to realize that Margot’s independent spirit had only been sleeping, and that now it was about to reassert itself. “The rules, you know,” she ventured as staunchly as she could.
“Oh—rules!” exclaimed Margot, tossing her short pigtail. “Gretta, I’m sick of rules. Can’t we ever break them? There’s nothing to do but keep different kinds of them all day long. How are we ever to do a brave thing if we’re kept in so!”
“There’s hockey,” said Gretta; “that’s not keeping us in. You know Helen says you’ll make a good player, and I know you will.”
“Yes, there is hockey,” agreed Margot. During the three weeks that had elapsed since the beginning of term the school games had appealed more and more strongly to the athletic out-of-door little Australian girl; she had hitherto, of course, been unused to anything like this organized playing with other girls, and had found it difficult, at first, to conform to the hockey regulations enforced so carefully by the games-mistress and by Helen, the captain. Before long, however, she was as keen on strokes, goals and matches as any of the Cliff School girls, and would soon, so the captain said, be a jolly good player.
The fact of keeping the rules at hockey, though she didn’t realize it, was helping her to understand and keep the school rules also, and Margot unconsciously enough was shaking down into the ordinary school-girl life with far less difficulty than Miss Slater had at first deemed possible. The thought of hockey now changed the current of her thoughts, and she turned a very interested face in Gretta’s direction.
“You like games, too, don’t you? Of course I shall miss hockey to-morrow, as I’m going home with Stella, but there’s that match next Saturday week against the Redford School. I’m longing to watch it. Oh, I wonder if I shall ever be in the team!”
“Of course you will,” replied her cousin in all good faith. “I love games, too, of course, but I know I’ll never be much good. I’m not half so fast a runner as you are, Margot; and then your wrists are so strong and you’re so much quicker in every sort of way than I am.”