"And I know that you have both been brought up more or less like whales; so I'll let you off with camphor pills and peppermint drops. Those you must have. Run along and change everything—everything, mind!—and I'll come around in five minutes and dose you. Run, now; make it a race, and I'll add hot lemonade to the stakes,—first prize and booby prize!"
"Yes, Miss Cortlandt," cried the two Undines; and off they set in a shower of spray, with the other girls at their heels.
CHAPTER XII.
AN ADVENTURE.
It all came from Peggy's forgetting her handkerchief. That was nothing remarkable. Rapidly though our heroine was developing, there was still plenty of the old Peggy left; and when she looked up at Miss Russell with a certain imploring gaze, the Principal was apt to say, without waiting for anything further: "Yes, Peggy, you may; but do try to remember it next time!"
But this time it was well that Peggy had not remembered it. She stumbled across the long dining-room quite in her own way, stubbing her toe against a sophomore's chair, and sending the sophomore's spoon clattering to the ground. Stooping, in confusion, to pick it up, with muttered apologies, she encountered the sophomore's head bent down for the same purpose, and some mutual star-gazing ensued. Finally she did manage to get out of the room, after cannoning against the door and taking most of the skin off her nose, and made her way up-stairs ruefully, rubbing the places that hurt most, and wondering where in her anatomy lay the "clumsy bone" that her father always talked about. "And it isn't there all the time!" said poor Peggy. "Sometimes I don't fall into anything for days, and then, all at once, it's like this!"
Shaking her head dolefully, she reached her own room, got the handkerchief, remembered with a great effort to shut the drawer, and came out into the corridor again—to come face to face with a man emerging from the opposite room.
The opposite room was Vanity Fair; and the man's hands were full of trinkets and knickknacks, and his pockets bulged in a suspicious way. He cast a wild glance over Peggy's shoulder at the open door of her room and the fire-escape beyond; evidently he had entered by that way, and counted on the dinner-hour's keeping every one below stairs till he got safe away. Now, however, baffled in this, he turned down the corridor with some degree of composure.