"I am going to live at O'Reilly's," she said.
"And you are safe and your things are safe?" he asked her, frowning so sternly that she felt she must have displeased him somehow. "I'm glad, very glad," he added, turning abruptly away. "Is there nothing I can do, Miss Walker?"
For answer she pointed to the volunteers from the village who had leaped away from the house. The crowd swerved back. There was a crackling sound, a crash; a great wave of heat swept across the campus and the front wall of Queen's fell in. They had one fleeting view of the familiar rooms, and then a cloud of ashes and smoke choked the picture. It was not long before only the rear wall of old brown Queen's was left standing.
"Dust to dust and ashes to ashes," said Edith Williams, solemnly.
It did seem very much like a funeral to the crowd of Queen's girls who stood in a shivering, loyal row to the end.
"So much for Queen's," said Margaret Wakefield. "She's dead and now what's to be done?"
It was decided that the girls should go to O'Reilly's for the time being, all other available quarters being about filled. If they preferred the post-office they could stay there; but they preferred O'Reilly's.
And thither, also, went Mrs. Markham and the Murphys and the maids from Queen's. In a few short hours, it would seem, Queen's had been changed to O'Reilly's, or O'Reilly's to Queen's. It turned out, too, that Mrs. O'Reilly was nearly related to Mr. Murphy, and all things, therefore, worked together in harmony.
O'Reilly's seemed a place of warmth and comfort to the half-frozen girls who clustered around the big fire in Judy's room at five o'clock that afternoon, scalding their tongues with hot tea and coffee while they discussed their plans for the future.
"Mrs. Markham told me," announced Margaret, a recognized authority on all subjects, political, domestic, financial and literary, "that it would probably be arranged to make O'Reilly's into a college house for the rest of the winter. She said they might even do over the rooms. It would be a smaller household than Queen's, of course—only eight or nine—but it would be rather cosy and—there would be no breaking up of old ties. If this isn't approved," she continued, exactly as if she were addressing a class meeting, "we shall have to scatter. There's another apartment in the Quadrangle and there are a few singletons left in some of the campus houses. Now, girls,"—her voice took on an oratorical ring—"of course, I know that we are nearly fifteen minutes' walk by the short cut from the college and that we may not be in things as much; but the best part of college we have here at O'Reilly's. And that's ourselves. I move that we change O'Reilly's into Queen's and make the best of it for the rest of the winter."