Edith, who never moved without a book, pulled a small edition of Keats from her pocket and began to read aloud:
"My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk—"
A short laugh interrupted this scene of intellectual repose. Edith paused and looked up, annoyed.
"I see nothing to laugh at," she said. But the faces of her classmates were quite serious.
"No one laughed," said Molly.
"A rudely person did laugh," announced Otoyo decisively. "But not of us. Another hidden behind the rock."
The girls looked around them uneasily. There was no one in sight, apparently, and yet there had been a laugh from somewhere close by. Coming to think of it, they had all heard it.
"I think we'd better be going," said Margaret, rising hastily. "We can see the view on the other side some other day."
Twice that day Margaret, the coming suffragette, had proved herself lacking in a certain courage generally attributed to the new and independent woman.
"Come on," she continued, irritably. "Don't stop to gather up those sandwiches. We must hurry."