CHAPTER XXIII
“MAY TIME IS GAY TIME”
May had arrived and with it the first warm spring weather along the Hudson River valley. Now the river was often crowded with sail boats dipping their white and gray canvases toward the sky and toward the water like the wings of a seagull; motor boats chugged along, making more noise than automobiles; while the steam yachts, ever the aristocrats among all water craft, sailing into their own harbors up and down the Hudson shores, ever and anon put forth again as though intending to leave home behind for adventures on the open sea. All the hills beyond and near by the neighborhood of Sleepy Hollow were like mammoth bouquets with their fragrance and beauty upturned to the sun, while within the meadows and fields and gardens were a greater variety of wild-flowers than can be found in many other places in this land.
Now at last the ranch girls understood why Miss Katherine Winthrop’s old home had been called “Primrose Hall” long before ever the school was thought of. For wild primroses blossomed everywhere, although the season was late, until the garden about the old place looked like the famous field of “The Cloth of Gold.”
As much as possible on these bright May days the students at Primrose Hall lived out of doors, but with the school year drawing to a close it was not always easy to desert lessons and the thought of approaching examinations.
One afternoon Jean and Frieda had arranged themselves in a corner of one of the big verandas with a table between them and a screen carefully set up to protect them from interruption. The girls were not talking, indeed an utter silence had reigned between them for the last ten minutes, broken only by the squeak of Frieda’s pen writing its last essay for the present term and by an occasional sigh from Jean from the depth of an oration by Cicero.
Stealing along outside the defensive wall of this screen a short time later mysterious footsteps might be heard, not of one pair of feet but of several, and yet not a single head appeared above it.
Frowning, Jean listened and then went on with her work, determined not to be lured from the strict path of duty.
“Whatever geese are outside the screen,” she thought to herself, “seeing our sign on it, ‘Positively No Admittance, Studying,’ will go away and leave us in peace.”
But when a screen falls to the floor with a bang only a few inches from where one is seated, certainly no degree of devotion to the study of literature and the classics will prevent one from jumping up with a scream. And this Jean and Frieda did at the same instant, and behold, there, with only the prostrate screen dividing them, were Gerry and Margaret, Lucy and Mollie Johnson, besides several other members of their Junior class!
“The city has fallen and the prisoners are ours!” Gerry announced, pointing a pen at Jean’s heart as an improvised dagger.