Then Sally surprised them all by saying, “Now that Virginia’s name is there, I’d like ever so much to get my name on it, too.”
“How’s that for idolatry?” Betsy began to tease, but Virginia remarked seriously, “Sally, your hardest subject seems to be algebra. I’ll help you, if you wish to study after hours just as Miss Torrence helps me.”
“Whee-gee!” Betsy whistled. “If Sally MacLean gets her name on the Honor Roll, it’s me as will faint and I don’t think I’ll ever come to.”
When the girls were gone, and the lights had been turned out, Margaret exclaimed, “Oh, Virg, see how beautiful the snowy world is in the moonlight. I’m so glad that Monday is a holiday. Let’s go for a hike if Mrs. Martin will permit. I just adore wading through snow-drifts.”
“That would be a great adventure and a new one for me,” said the girl from the desert where snow-drifts are unknown. They were indeed to have an adventure.
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST ADVENTURE
“A whole holiday and every hour of it free. I feel like some caged bird let loose,” Margaret exclaimed as the five girls from Vine Haven Seminary started away from the school. All were clad in their warmest coats, with leggings, mittens and flying scarfs to match the bright tams that perched jauntily atop of their heads.
“And to think that we may hike wherever we wish, on only one condition, and that to report to Mrs. Martin half an hour before lunch,” Barbara chattered.
Virginia laughed. “One might think it the greatest kind of a lark just to go outside of the gate,” she said. “I can understand it now, but when I remember how I have galloped all over the desert for miles without thought of keeping within certain boundaries, I don’t wonder that we feel like caged birds.”
“Snow birds, then,” Betsy’s merry face beamed out from beneath her cherry colored tam. “Sally surely is. I just adore those white furs. You look like a princess, Sal, stepped out of a fairy book with your golden curls hanging like a mantle about your shoulders.”