"Sallie and the Dowager!" she hissed in her ear. "Follow me!"
With a sweep of her hand, Patty scrambled the cards together and rose. There would be no chance to escape by the door; the Dowager's voice was already audible in the outer office.
"Goo' by!" said Patty, springing to the window. "Gypsies call. We must go."
She scrambled over the sill and dropped eight feet to the ground. Conny followed. They were both able pupils of Miss Jellings.
Mr. Laurence K. Gilroy, open-mouthed, stood staring at the spot where they had been. The next instant, he was bowing courteously to the principals of St. Ursula's, and striving hard to concentrate a dazed mind upon the short-circuit in the West Wing.
Patty and Conny left the car—and a number of interested passengers—at the corner before they reached the school. Circumnavigating the wall, until they were opposite the stables, they approached the house modestly by the back way. They had the good fortune to encounter no one more dangerous than the cook (who gave them some gingerbread) and they ultimately reached their home in Paradise Alley none the worse for the adventure—and ninety cents to the good.
When the long, light evenings came, St. Ursula's no longer filled in the interim between dinner and evening study with indoor dancing, but romped about on the lawn outside. To-night, being Saturday, there was no evening study to call them in, and everybody was abroad. The school year was almost over, the long vacation was at hand—the girls were as full of bubbling spirits as sixty-four young lambs. Games of blindman's-buff, and pussy-wants-a-corner, and cross-tag were all in progress at once. A band of singers on the gymnasium steps was drowning out a smaller band on the porte-cochère; half-a-dozen hoop-rollers were trotting around the oval, and scattered groups of strollers, meeting in the narrow paths, were hailing each other with cheerful calls.
Patty and Conny and Priscilla, washed and dressed and chastened, were wandering arm in arm through the summer twilight, talking—a trifle soberly—of the long-looked-forward-to future that was now so oppressively close upon them.
"You know," Patty spoke with a sort of frightened gulp—"in another week we'll be grown-up!"