"Er—a kind of a—er—je ne sais quoi in the temperament—not exactly a nonconformist, you know; but just a little—well, not quite like us!"
"I see!" contentedly replied mystified Annie Smith. "But I do love her; she's such a dear. So gentle and so ready to help everybody, and so splendid at sports. What tremendous friends she and Jessica have become, haven't they, since the night of the scare? I often wonder what made her walk in her sleep like that; she's never done it since."
"Indigestion, I've always thought. Cookie was away on her holidays, if you remember, and her locum tenens, understudy, you know, made pastry like cement; I always thought, too, that Principal gave her that lovely little room right away from the rest of us on account of it—the sleep-walking, I mean. I'm sure I should have died if I'd found her standing over me in the moonlight in the middle of the night. It must be awfully jolly though having someone in India who writes to you every three months. Isn't she lucky to have been born in India, and to have had an ayah, a kind of native nurse, you know, who still worships her, and writes to her, and sends real Indian presents, and to have had a V.C. for a father—Leonie, I mean?"
Annie Smith laughed that happy laugh which is the outcome of a perfectly contented mind. "She deserves all the luck she gets, and what luck for us having her as head next term. What a favourite she is with everyone, even old Signer Valenti! Oh, dear, I wish to-morrow's exams were over; my fingers feel just like blanc-mange when I think of that nocturne."
"Never say die, Ann! Have you heard Leonie play the Moonlight?"
"No! What's it like?"
"Simply awful, just like Mam'zel when she thumps downstairs in her felt slippers."
There fell a space of drowsy silence in which the girls lay back on the grass incline, and solemnly munched chocolates with youth's delightful dissociation from anything more perplexing than the passing of the actual hour.
"No!" murmured Annie Smith, breaking the drowsy spell. "She's not like us—couldn't be with a V.C. father and India as a birthright. But isn't it all wonderfully mysterious?"
Dear unsophisticated soul, whose wanderlust was yearly arrested, or rather satisfied, with the summer holiday by the sea, and whose rector father acted as a weekly soporific to his congregation.