Nancy had gradually become very weary of her eight cavaliers. She yearned infinitely to be back with Miss Campbell and her friends. With sad and tearful eyes she gazed on the ruins of her pink hat.
“I’ve been wicked,—I’ve been wicked! Will they ever forgive me?” she thought, while two hot tears rolled down her cheeks and fell on the rumpled folds of her damp dress.
“Don’t cry,” whispered the student sitting beside her in the stern of the boat. “There are lots of hat stores in Oxford. Can’t it be furbished up a bit?” He pointed to the crushed mass of pink.
“It isn’t the hat,—at least not entirely,” sobbed Nancy. “It’s because I went off like this without leaving word and with so many strange b-boys.”
“But we aren’t altogether strange, you see, because several of us know Peppercorn and the Paxtons,” the young man assured her.
As the boat skimmed over the waters back toward Oxford and Nancy saw the towers of St. Magdalen’s glistening in the sunshine, she began to feel more and more uncomfortable and wretched. Perhaps Miss Campbell would send her back to America with a note to her mother and father that she could not be responsible for a girl like Nancy. She would lose her three friends, Billie and Elinor and Mary. She would not visit the castle in Ireland, nor see Maria again, and then—there was her best hat,—ruined—utterly ruined. She choked down her sobs. She must command herself before all these strangers. Dipping her handkerchief into the water, she dabbled her eyes pathetically.
“I’m afraid you’ll think American girls are dreadful cry babies,” she said, “but, you see, I know I’ve done wrong and I can’t think of any explanation or excuse.”
The eight young men were deeply sympathetic. Nancy weeping was quite as fascinating to them as Nancy smiling and demure.
“Never regret the past. Think only of the future,” observed a cadaverous-looking student regarding Nancy through the double lenses of a pair of large spectacles like a quizzical owl.
Nancy gazed at him doubtfully.