This was her good-night to them. When the two girls had scrambled into bed, all of a shiver from crossing the cold hall and the big chamber, Mrs. Hogan banged the door, and the next moment they heard her fixing the kitchen fire for the night.
Dorothy had gathered the little, starved body of Celia in her arms. The little one sighed, sobbed, and then lay still. Before Dorothy had realized it, Celia was fast asleep—so wearied was the little one.
But the older girl lay, broad awake, for some minutes. Her breath puffed out in plainly visible mist, the air of the room was so cold. The freezing water in the pitcher on the washstand snapped and crackled. A shade had been raised to the top of the sash, and that ghostly light always present when it is snowing at night, faintly illuminated the bare room.
“Swish! swish! swish!” the snow beat upon the clapboards outside. She saw that the lower sash was completely covered by the snow. The drifts were piling up on this side of the house, and Dorothy finally dropped to sleep, hugging her little charge, with the feeling that she was being buried alive beneath the soft, white mantle.
CHAPTER XII
TAVIA IS MYSTIFIED
Tavia, among other things, had a long Latin verse to translate. This was one of the “extras,” or “conditions” heaped upon the already burdened shoulders of the irrepressible.
“But if Olaine wasn’t such a mean, mean thing she wouldn’t have given me all those black marks—so’t I couldn’t go with Dorothy on her walk,” Tavia said to some of the other girls who looked in on her that Saturday afternoon.
From which it may clearly be drawn that Tavia was one of those persons who desire “to eat their cake and have it, too!” She had had her fun, in breaking the school rules; but she did not like to pay for the privilege.
“I wouldn’t mind if it was mathematics,” wailed Tavia, when Ned Ebony and Cologne came in to condole with her. “But this beastly old Latin——”