PEGGY PARSONS

AT PREP SCHOOL

BY

ANNABEL SHARP

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY

CHICAGO — NEW YORK

Made in U. S. A.

Contents

PEGGY PARSONS AT PREP SCHOOL

[CHAPTER I—THE SERENADE]

Peggy Parsons wove her curly hair into a golden braid, and stretching her slim arms above her head yawned sleepily.

“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” sniggered her room-mate out of the semi-darkness of the one-candle-power illumination. “They don’t allow it here.”

“Don’t allow what?” said Peggy, beginning to prance before the mirror to admire the fluttering folds of her new blue silk kimono, which had been given her by a cousin the week before school opened, with the delightful label, “For Midnight Fudge Parties.”

“Don’t allow what?” she repeated curiously, bobbing up and down before her reflection, “can’t I even yawn if I want to?”

“No,” her room-mate unsympathetically insisted, “they teach us manners along with our French and mathematics, and yawning isn’t one,—a manner, I mean. Yawning is enough to keep you from getting high marks. This is a finishing school we’ve come to, please remember.”

“It will finish me,” sighed Peggy, with a final whirl of blue draperies, “if I can’t do as I like. Why, I always have.”

“I’m glad I’ve got you for a room-mate, then,” said the other girl heartily. “It will be such fun to see what happens.”

Peggy blew out the candle and crept across the room, in the darkness, nearly colliding with a little rose tree that had been given to the girls to brighten their room against their possible homesickness.

“What’s going to happen now is that I’m going to sleep,” she laughed. “And I’m glad I’ve got you for a room-mate, Katherine Foster, just—anyway.”

And both girls smiled into the darkness, for their first day at Andrews had given them a sense of pleasant anticipation for the rest of the year.

Just as their vivid memories of the preceding twelve hours began to mix themselves up confusingly with dreams, the sound of singing bursting into triumphant volume under their windows caused both sleepy pairs of eyes to pop open.

“Katherine—?” breathed Peggy excitedly.

“Peggy—?” whispered Katherine, “oh, do you suppose it is?”

“Andrews opened late, and the other schools were already well into their football and basketball stage: that afternoon the Amherst team had been in town to play the local college football eleven, and there had been rumors that the glee club had been among those who cheered on the Amherst side.”

The song came up now, sweet and strong, with its sure tenor soaring almost to their window, it seemed.

Swiftly and silently the two were out of bed and had pattered across to peep down. There they were! There they really were, in the moonlight, the glee club, singing up to the open dormitory windows.

“Cheer for Old Amherst,

Amherst must win.

Fight to the fin-ish,

Never give in.

All do your best, boys,

We’ll do the rest, boys,

For this is old Amherst’s da—ay.

Rah, rah, rah....”

Peggy felt her arm being pinched black and blue, but she was beyond caring.

“O—oh, it’s heavenly,” she sighed.

“Peggy, it’s a serenade,” breathed Katherine happily.

“Of course it is,” assented Peggy, as if she were used to this kind of thing, “and it’s a very nice one.”

“Peggy, oughtn’t you to—to throw down flowers when you’re serenaded?” Katherine demanded suddenly.

“Oh, yes, you have to,” Peggy agreed, so that she might not show how ignorant she was of the requirements of so delightful a situation.

“We haven’t any.” Katherine’s tone was forlorn and heartbroken.

“Wait,” cried Peggy, scrambling down from the window seat where she had perched, “the roses,—off the rose tree.”

And she ran to their treasured plant and seized it, jardiniere and all, and ran back to the window so that she might not miss any of the singing while she was despoiling their little tree of its blossoms. From every window in the wing a dim figure might be discerned behind the shaking lace curtains. With the plant tucked firmly under one arm Peggy leaned out dreamily.

“It’s all a lovely thing to have happen,” she said, “now I’m going to begin and throw the roses down. Ouch! Goodness,—oh, dear!”

She pricked herself on a thorn and in jerking away her hand she forgot that she was holding anything.

The rose tree toppled an instant on the window-sill and then went down, flower pot, jardinière and all, into those singing, upturned faces, two stories below. There followed a frightful crashing sound, and then a stupefied silence.

Peggy, covering her face with her hands, turned and ran from the window, jumped into bed and pulled the sheet over her head.

“Oh, they’re dead, they’re dead, and I’ve killed them,” she thought miserably to herself.

She never wanted to hear a glee-club again, she never wanted to look into the face of a living soul. This was a fine ending of a wonderful day, this was, that she should have killed, goodness knew how many fine young men, and talented ones, too. Just when they were singing up so trustingly, for her to have hurled this calamity down upon them! She shook with sobs. Oh, she had only meant to do a kind deed, a courteous deed—and she had killed them. She buried her poor little crying face deeper into the pillow.

After a few moments she felt her room-mate shaking her, and when she reluctantly uncovered her tear-stained face she was astonished to hear laughter.

“It’s all right, come back to the window quickly,” Katherine was chortling, “it’s—just great.”

Oh, the glorious shaft of light that shot across Peggy’s mental horizon! Then they weren’t dead. No one—not even a heartless room-mate could laugh at her if she had really killed them. She dashed her hand across her eyes and went back to peer cautiously down in the moonlight.

Each of the singers brandished some tiny thing in the shining white light of the moon, could it be a—flower—a—rose?

“Little Rose Girl!

Little Rose Girl!

We’ll sing and shout your praises o’er and o’er,

To you ever, we’ll be loyal,

Till the sun shall climb the heavens no more!”

Peggy caught her breath. They were all singing straight at her window,—and oh, moonlit clouds! and wonder of stars!—to her.

“Oh—oh, thank you,” she said softly, over and over, “thank you, thank you. I’m so glad you’re alive,—and I’m glad I am, too.”

Fastening the tiny flowers in their buttonholes, the glee-club began to move off. Peggy sat still in the window seat, her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

The cool moonlight drifted in around her, and she breathed it in slowly. Katherine came and curled up beside her.

“I don’t feel a bit sleepy now, do you,” she said, “and I’m glad we showed we liked the serenade.”

Peggy smiled and then she gave one of the forbidden yawns.

“Oh, it’s nice to be alive, and to be young, and to be away at school,” she murmured, disregarding Katherine’s observation. “And, just think, to-morrow we have a perfectly good new day to wake up into.”

[CHAPTER II—BEING A BELLE]

“To think that one of my young ladies—one of MY young ladies,” the principal repeated impressively, “should have been guilty of such a misdemeanor—”

“What’s a misdemeanor?” Peggy whispered in her room-mate’s ear as they sat in chapel and listened to an address that was evidently going to be serious for somebody.

“Sh,” said Katherine. “She means us.”

“Means us?” demanded Peggy incredulously. “Why, I never did any misdemeanors in my life.”

“As to throw—or hurl—or drop a flower-pot down to the pavement from a window in my school,” the cold voice continued.

“O—oh,” murmured Peggy, “I thought maybe she’d seen me yawn.”

“Now I am going to put my young ladies upon their honor to tell me which one of you showed so little regard for me and for the school as to conduct herself in this manner.” The principal lifted her chin in a deliberate way she had, “and as you pass out from chapel I request the young lady who has this particular thing on her conscience to come forward and tell me that it was she who did it.”

The lines of marching girls swung down the aisles, and Peggy rose with them. “I haven’t it on my conscience,” she told Katherine, “but I suppose I ought to tell her.”

“I will go with you,” offered Katherine generously. “It was just as much my fault, and I’d have done it if you hadn’t.”

But Peggy shook her head and threaded her way up the aisle to the principal’s desk.

There she paused, waiting.

“Good-morning, Miss Parsons,” the principal said pleasantly, for she had taken an especial fancy to Peggy the day before when she had been left at the school by her aunt. And looking down into that gleeful little face this morning, shining as it was with all the joy of living, and the irresponsible happiness that comes only with a free conscience, how could she dream of connecting Peggy’s approach with the confession she had requested from the girl who had dropped the rose tree.

“Good-morning,” said Peggy, her face crumpling into its funny little smile, “I didn’t mean to.”

“What? Didn’t mean to—child, are you telling me—?”

There was certainly nothing of the hangdog about Peggy.

She nodded.

“I was just as sorry as you are for a time,” she continued, “but you see it made them sing to me and I can’t be sorry about that, can I? Nobody could. It was so beautiful.”

She explained simply.

“I’m very sorry such a thing should have happened,” the principal said solemnly when the recital was over. “The other young ladies are going to see a performance of the ‘Blue Bird’ this afternoon, and this prevents your going. I cannot permit you to go, of course, after this, much as I regret it.”

Peggy turned away, a little twinge of disappointment in her heart. She had heard the girls discussing the matinée party for to-day, and she had never dreamed of not going with them. As she left the chapel Miss Carrol, the youngest teacher, timidly approached the principal.

“I am going to chaperone the girls to-day, am I not?” she asked.

“Yes, Miss Carrol.”

“I thought I’d venture to suggest that Peggy Parsons be forgiven this once—I don’t think she did anything so very terrible—and that she be allowed to come with us to the first party. Don’t you remember when you were away at school—how heartbreaking it was if you were shut out of anything, and how easily a fit of homesickness came on to blot out all the sunlight of the world? Don’t you remember—Mrs. Forest?”

Mrs. Forest didn’t remember at all. It wasn’t just because all such experiences for her had been very long ago—many women remember all the more tenderly as they grow older,—but she had set out to be a good disciplinarian, and the girls she graduated from her school must be as nearly alike as possible, she wanted them all run in the same mold of training. But Miss Carrol’s pleading voice and her eager eyes did what Mrs. Forest’s own reminiscences could not do for her—they softened her attitude toward Peggy and finally she gave her consent for Peggy to go.

Peggy, flying back to her room, her heart full of disappointment, unaware of the change in her immediate fortunes brought about by Miss Carrol, heard her name mentioned by a group at the foot of the big staircase.

“This is really a very clever paper little Miss Parsons has written for my English class,” one teacher was saying, tapping the folded sheet Peggy had labored over as the first of her work for Andrews.

“Yes?” politely inquired another. “That’s rather unusual for Andrews. We have so many beautiful girls, but so few brilliant ones. Peggy Parsons may be popular—and she may develop into a genius, but she’ll never be a belle, will she? Not like some of our girls.”

Peggy’s feet grew heavy on the stairs. She went miserably on to her room and there carefully locked the door, and went and stood before the mirror. She had never been conscious of just how she did look before. She had never thought of being beautiful, but much less had she thought of being NOT beautiful. That was too tragic. She saw a little sober face, with clear brown eyes, and goldy flyaway hair above them.

“Oh, people will only like me when I laugh,” she cried, and her face crinkled into its familiar expression of merriment, and she watched the fine dark eyebrows curve upward, and the dimples dance crookedly into the flushed cheeks.

“Ye—es,” she said slowly. “It isn’t so bad then. But I will—be a belle, anyway. You see if I’m not, I will be one and surprise them all. Maybe I’ve never tried to make myself look pretty before. I will try awfully hard now. And I’ll turn out the most wonderful belle of them all, I shouldn’t wonder. So there, now.”

She danced back from the mirror, her hair-brush in her hand.

“I’ll begin at the top,” she said, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

Just then Miss Carrol knocked at the door.

“Come in,” sang Peggy blithely, her spirits more or less restored by the prospect of the task she had set herself.

The door rattled.

“I can’t,” announced Miss Carrol’s voice.

“Oh, I forgot,” cried Peggy, and she ran to the door and turned the key. Flinging it open, she laughed up into Miss Carrol’s face. “Come in,” she invited a second time, “I’m very glad to see somebody even if you’ve only come to scold me. Have you come to scold me?”

Miss Carrol shook her head, and explained that Mrs. Forest had relented, and she was to be of the matinée party, after all.

Peggy hugged her gratefully.

“Excuse me,” she said, “for mussing up your dress, but I just had to. People have been hurting my feelings all the morning and now you come and are—kind. And it means that I can be one right now. I’ll be one for this!”

“One what?” asked the youngest teacher, puzzled. “You girls have the oddest things in your minds half the time. What is it you’re going to be now?”

Peggy hesitated, and then she came over and whispered.

“A belle,” she said with her lips near Miss Carrol’s ear. “One of the teachers said I couldn’t be one.”

To her hurt surprise, her companion threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, is that all?” she said. “Well, that’s nothing dangerous. I must run along now, Peggy, child, but all the girls are to meet in the parlor at half-past one for the matinée. We must leave promptly at that time.”

Katherine’s trunk had not arrived yet, so she planned to go right to the parlor after luncheon and wait there for the party to assemble, as she had no other dress to wear than the blue serge she had on. But Peggy left the table in a flurry of excitement and began to lay out all her prettiest things. A dainty little brown velvet suit, with a chiffon waist, and an adorable hat that came dark against her light curls promised well. She manicured her nails, humming all the while, then she steamed her face and dashed cold water on it till it was all glowing. She did her hair twice and it didn’t suit, so she took it all down and experimented with it again. Her hair curled irregularly, and did not lie sleek and smooth and flatly rippled like the hair of the girls who had theirs marcelled. So she borrowed Katherine’s electric iron and with a few swift touches sought to make her own natural, pretty hair look artificially waved.

She used powder for the first time. After rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel to keep the glow, she spread on the powder as thickly as she dared. Her nose was alluringly chalk white when she had finished. It was only talcum powder but enough of it had its effect. The girls of Andrews were not allowed to wear jewelry, except in the evening, unless it were a simple band bracelet or a tiny, inconspicuous gold chain and pendant.

So Peggy closed her jewel case with a snap against the temptation of a long gold snake bracelet with emerald eyes that would have made her feel very much more dressed up.

In the early stages of her dressing she thought she heard someone calling up the stairs, she thought there was an unusual stir of girls clattering down into the hall, but she was too engrossed in the process of becoming beautiful really to sense what might be going on. Once she even thought she heard her name, but she was just applying a precious drop of concentrated violet to the lace at her throat, and though she called out mechanically, “What,” she received no answer, and decided she had been mistaken.

At length, complete, she surveyed herself happily. “I guess I look almost as pretty as the actresses, now,” she approved. “I’ll go down to the parlor—it must be nearly half-past one.”

She went down the stairs, with a curious sense of the silence of the house. Why weren’t there more girls trooping down with her? She felt a chill of misgiving when she reached the parlor door. No laughter drifted out, no sound of chattering came from within. With a quick fear she opened the door and paused wonderingly on the threshold as a perfectly empty room met her gaze.

She was too late to start with them—perhaps she could catch up yet. She would hurry to the theater and perhaps they had waited for her in the lobby. Panting, she tore across the lawn and boarded the first street-car. It seemed to go so slowly—as if they’d never get there. She found herself tearing the little lacey handkerchief she had taken from her bag.

There was the theater. She pressed the bell, and, getting off before the car had come fully to a stop, breathless, she entered the building. No group of girls, no Miss Carrol. She looked up wildly at the clock above the ticket seller’s window. Four o’clock, it said! Almost time for the show to be over! Oh, how awful, how awful, where had the time gone? What had happened to her? Fighting back the tears at the futility of everything, she approached the ticket window.

“Are—the—Andrews girls in there?” she faltered.

That was a silly question and she knew it. Because, of course, they were in there, this was where they had been coming—and she had, too, for that matter if she could only have gotten here on time. But at the minute she could think of nothing else to say and she was conscious of a vague hope that the ticket-seller would help her, would suggest something. She would gladly buy her own ticket and get in if only she could get to their box afterward. But she didn’t know which one it was, and she didn’t know how to manage it, anyway.

“I don’t know if they are,” the ticket-seller was replying, casually. “How should I know?”

Peggy turned dejectedly away from the window. This was more than she could stand. Never in her life had she felt so little and so helpless and so—yes, so homesick. She couldn’t go back to the school and have to face possible questions. She would stay downtown somewhere until it was time for the matinée to be over and then she would return about the same time the others did.

She drifted out into the waning sunlight of the street, and looked hopelessly about her. Next the theater was the public library. This looked like a refuge and she went in and walked despondently over to the librarian’s desk.

“Please find me something to read—about—about girls having a party,” she choked.

————

When she was back at school, in her own room, clad once more in the loved blue silk kimono, the ordeal of dinner and curious questions over, Katherine, her room-mate, looked up from her algebra book and said suddenly,

“Oh, Peggy, we missed you so.”

“Did you?” cried Peggy wistfully. “Well, I’ve decided something. I don’t care a bit about being a belle. I’d rather get to places on time, and feel like myself,—and be just Peggy Parsons, after all.”

[CHAPTER III—A BACON BAT]

An eventful day for Peggy came after two weeks of school. In it began a curious series of happenings that added flavor to her whole school life, and gave her, finally, the power to be, as her room-mate laughingly said, “sort of magic.”

And all this came about through so prosaic a thing as bacon. The domestic science class, well under way with an excellent teacher, decided to have a “bacon bat,” after the custom of the Smith College girls, all by themselves on some bit of rock that jutted into the river.

Peggy had helped Katherine do the shopping for the treat,—Katherine had been at Andrews for two years now, and knew just how it was done. Then the seven girls of the class started off, each with a paper bag in her hand, for the method of conveying the supplies to the picnic grounds was always very informal for a bacon bat. There were no little woven picnic baskets to hang picturesquely over their arms, there were no daintily packed little shoe-boxes of sandwiches. There was just the jar of bacon strips in a paper bag, the bottle of olives in another paper bag, and the two dozen rolls, a generous supply, in the biggest paper bag of all. These were the simple requisites for a bacon bat, and even the olives were not necessary, Katherine termed them useless frills. There was a tiny box of matches, too, that Peggy slipped into the pocket of her red jacket. It has happened that a merry group of girls has gone on a bacon bat with everything but the matches, and then unless they were Camp Fire girls and knew how to coax fire out of two dry sticks they met a terrible disappointment, when, their appetites all worked up for the occasion, they found they couldn’t cook the party after all.

If you were on good terms with the grocer, he kept a box of matches—the old fashioned kind—under the counter and offered you a dozen or so, loose, when you bought your bacon. But Peggy had wanted to buy a little box, insisting that if she had to start the fire a dozen might not be enough.

“Where are we going to have it?” Peggy thought to ask as they strolled, laughing, along the road away from the school.

“On the River Bank near Gloomy House,” cried three girls at once, “that’s the ideal spot.”

“Near—what?” asked Peggy in concern. It didn’t sound very picnicky to her.

“Right there, ahead,” said Katherine, pointing, “right through those grounds, and down to the water—because, of course, we can hardly have our fire except on some sort of little stone island—with water enough to put it out if it got rambunctious.”

The girls were turning now over the long, dank grass, and making their way in the direction of a great empty-looking ramshackle old house with sagging porches and dull windows.

“Nobody lives there, do they?” Peggy asked.

“Oh,—sh—yes!”

The girls tiptoed over the grass, skirting the lawn in order to keep as far away from Gloomy House as possible. Peggy was not yet familiar with the traditions of the town in which Andrews was situated. It seemed strange to her that after the girls had chosen this place with such unanimous enthusiasm they should assume such an air of discomfort and mystery now that they had come. She studied the old house, dignified even in its decay, with its trailing, rasping vines blowing against the pillars of the porch, and its sunken, uneven steps, and then quite unaccountably she shivered and hurried past it as fast as the other girls.

“I don’t want to come here for a picnic,” she panted, “if it’s all so queer. Why didn’t we choose some nice sunny place with a little stream to drink out of, and one big tree for shade? It’s so dark and overgrown, as we get through here, that it seems more like an exploring expedition than a regular picnic to me.”

“Oh,” cried Florence Thomas, the best cook in the domestic science class, “we can fry bacon down on those rocks in the river, and there is a grape-vine swing on the bank that goes sailing way out over the water with you. Why, there just isn’t any other place so nice for a picnic—here you always feel as if you might have adventures.”

“Adventures, at a picnic, usually mean cows or snakes,” sighed Peggy, “I hope we don’t have any.”

The girls clambered down the steep slope to the water, and Florence and Dorothy Trowbridge began at once to gather twigs and branches.

“How are we going to cook this bacon?” asked Peggy suddenly, “when we get our fire? Nobody brought a frying pan.”

“Frying pan!” echoed Florence over an armful of nice dry chips and twigs. “We get sticks.”

Peggy saw that each girl was breaking a branch from a near-by tree, testing it to see that it was not “too floppy,” as Katherine put it, and would be green enough not to catch fire easily. Peggy found a delightful little branch, and began stripping the end, as she saw the others do. The fire was by this time crackling and it was a temptation to begin right away, for the walk had made them hungry—or, perhaps, they hadn’t needed the walk: healthy girls like healthy boys are always hungry. But Florence reminded them that their bacon would simply be burned to a crisp if they thrust it in the flames now, so they waited a few minutes, reluctantly enough, until the red and blue sparks sputtered down to a steady glow, hotter and hotter at the heart of the fire. Then the girls each pierced a piece of bacon with their pointed stick and held it gloatingly into the red glow. Peggy enthusiastically opened rolls, so that the crisp hot slices might go sizzling into place as soon as they were taken from the fire, and the roll might be clapped together upon them.

“Isn’t this comfy?” asked Florence, munching her first fiery sandwich. “If the rain and wind had never come, I suppose you could find the ashes, on this flat rock, left by every class that ever went to Andrews. Ouch!—Mercy!—Peggy, what did you let me bite that for, when the end was still burning?”

Peggy laughingly dipped up a cupful of water from the river and passed it to poor Florence, who was trying to wink back the tears from her eyes.

“If you drink that now you’ll smoke,” she warned delightedly. “Girls, girls,—fire!”

“I—don’t—care—” gulped Florence, waving the rest of her roll and bacon through the air to cool it. “Hot as that was, I guess old Mr. Huntington of Gloomy House, up there, would be glad to have it. If he can smell the smoke of this little feast—with that lovely amber coffee Dorothy is making—I guess he wishes he was a girl and could come down and get some. Just think,” she turned to Peggy, “in twenty years he’s never had any hot coffee—or more than enough to keep a bird alive.”

Peggy sat down on a stone and poised an olive half-way to her mouth.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“He’s very poor, you know,” said Florence.

“Too poor to buy coffee?—I should think somebody in the town—”

“Oh, my dear,” interrupted one of the other girls, “scared to death! Nobody’d think of offering to do anything for him. He’s the proudest man in the world. He used to own most of this town, but everything has drifted away from him. He never goes anywhere—nobody ever sees him. He wouldn’t want to see anyone. He telephones to the grocery for just a few things once in a while, and that’s how he gets along. Why, Peggy, you look so funny.”

“While we’re sitting here, having a party, do you mean to tell me the man that lives in Gloomy House is starving?” asked Peggy in a hushed voice.

“Well, sort of hungry, but don’t you worry about it, we can’t do anything about it, Peggy.” Florence handed Peggy a fresh roll with a crisp slice of bacon temptingly projecting from the ends. “He couldn’t have been starving for twenty years, you know—but it would be nearer that than I’d like to experience for myself.”

Peggy’s head drooped thoughtfully. The sunlight, glinting down here and there through the dense green of the trees, shone in a little patch of light on her brown-gold hair. She was a vivid little person, with laughing black eyes and cheeks that flared red through their tan. Her brown arms were clasped over her knees now, as she studied the moist, pebbly sand at her feet.

“I’d have made him some coffee,” she said at last, her crooked dimple flickering into view for just an instant.

“No, you wouldn’t,” denied Florence Thomas, “nobody has been in that house to do anything as daring as that for years. There’s a mystery about it, I tell you—and, in spite of story books, nobody likes to probe too deeply into mysteries. Some people even say that a relative of Mr. Huntington’s stole all his money from him and that’s why he has to live so poorly. Yes, there are lots of stories—”

Peggy brushed the crumbs out of her lap serenely.

“How silly,” she said, “as if anybody’s stealing from the poor old man were reason enough why all the rest of the townspeople should stay away from him and leave him poor,” she said. “What has that to do with my making him some coffee? Even if he’d been the one who stole—still I don’t see the application to this particular question,” she concluded.

“Well, there are other tales,” insisted the crestfallen Florence, and, their coffee cups in their hands, the girls gathered around to tell Peggy many harrowing incidents connected with the great house back from the river, and she heard them quietly, piercing slices of bacon with her stick the while.

“Let’s go up and cook him a dinner,” she cried, springing to her feet when they had done. “We are a cooking class, aren’t we, and that’s the best thing we do, isn’t it? And here we go on just preparing all the good things back at school for us to eat ourselves—it seems, well, piggish. Wouldn’t it be lovely to demonstrate our next lesson by bringing all the materials up to Gloomy House and cooking up a big, wonderful dinner, and having it with Mr. Huntington? We can’t give him a million dollars or anything like that, but we can make one day a lot brighter—and, besides, I can’t stand it to think of anyone hungry—will you, girls? What do you say?”

She stood before them, lifting her slim hand for the vote, her eyes shining with eagerness to put her plan at once into execution.

The other girls gasped. Peggy, although she had been with them so short a time, had won a large place in their admiration.

“He wouldn’t let us,” reminded Florence, puckering her forehead thoughtfully. “Didn’t I tell you he’d bite anybody, fairly, that dreamed of trying to offer him charity? Peggy, I believe you’re partly right, though, maybe we could do something, but it would never work that way.”

“Well,” said Peggy promptly, sitting down to think it out, “how can it be done?”

For to Peggy life presented no unsolvable problems. She never thought of cluttering her joyous way with impossibilities. Once a plan seemed good to her it was only a question of How, and not of Whether.

“We might invite a lot of people to the school,” timidly suggested one of the young cooks.

“He’d never come,” Florence shook her head.

“Well, then,” cried Peggy, “here we are! Let’s give a series of dinners—at the houses of the trustees, and the different girls in the class, just to show what we can do, and we’ll have the accounts put in the town paper, so he’ll see what we’re doing, and then—” her eyes shone and she could hardly talk fast enough to let the girls see the glory of her new idea, “then we’ll go to his house and ask permission to give him one, and it won’t be charity or anything, and it will be fun for everybody—oh, girls, isn’t that gorgeous?”

“OOoo—oo,” shivered Florence at the thought of really committing herself to such a daring decision. “Ye-es, I think we might do that. But we’d never have the courage to go and invite him.”

“Peggy would,” championed the timid one. “Let’s appoint her a committee of one.”

“Unanimously appointed a committee of one,” shouted the other girls gleefully. “Peggy, how soon will all this be?”

Peggy laughingly flung aside her toasting stick, sprang erect, and tried vainly to smooth back her flying gold-toned hair. “Right—NOW!” she declared triumphantly, “we won’t wait to give it to the trustees first.”

“Good-by, Peggy,” murmured Florence demurely, and the others drew closer together as Peggy actually turned her back on them and went up the slope to Gloomy House.

Surprised at her daring, overwhelmed by the boldness of the thing she had undertaken, they watched Peggy disappear over the top of the river bank.

[CHAPTER IV—THE INSIDE OF GLOOMY HOUSE]

Up the long walk to Gloomy House, her feet sinking in the wet leaves that had fallen from the branches overhead, Peggy went slowly, her heart pounding.

She was doing what no one else in town would have dared to do, and as she neared the old house, with its tumbled-down step, she began to wonder if perhaps she was afraid.

“Walk on, walk on,” she whispered to herself, for she knew that if she hesitated for an instant she would run. And how could she go back and face the cooking class if, after all her planning, she was a coward now?

So mechanically she walked on, and at last she found herself really ascending the creaking steps. When she stood on the porch with its leafless and ragged vines flapping in the wind a kind of chill unreality seemed to shut her in. She hurried to ring the bell so that someone—anyone—would come and she would not be alone. The bell was an old fashioned one, and as she rang she heard it jangling emptily through the house. It was certainly a very dismal way for callers to have to announce themselves.

When the unpleasant sound had ceased the house and everything about it settled back to silence again. This lasted and lasted. Peggy clutched nervously at her little red jacket. What if nobody would come at all? There was no one TO come, except Mr. Huntington himself—and now he evidently wasn’t going to. She might have known. She was overwhelmed with a sense of failure. Those lovely hot muffins she had dreamed of preparing for him, that wonderful steak, smothered in onions, that delicious— Down the uncarpeted stairs inside she could hear the reluctant thud, thud of footsteps!

Oh, he was coming.

Gratingly, the door swung open and a man’s head looked cautiously out.

Peggy reflected that Mr. Huntington looked a great deal more scared than she was, and the thought helped a little.

“How do you do?” she asked faintly.

Mr. Huntington looked down at the vivid little figure in the red coat, and his eyes widened.

“A—how do you do?” he said mildly.

Well, he wasn’t going to eat her, anyway, so she needn’t be so frightened, Peggy decided with a breath of relief.

“Oh, Mr. Huntington,” she said with a surprising increase of confidence, “I came—I came—I—came—” but the confidence had evaporated before she could find words to explain.

“I see you did,” replied the old man, still mildly—and could she believe that twinkle in his eyes was a smile? Perhaps he didn’t often have much to smile about, so that this was the best he could do.

“Won’t you come in?” he invited, as an afterthought.

And Peggy followed him into Gloomy House.

The hall was stately, with its wide folding doors opening into the library on one side and a dining-room on the other. In it were an old tall clock and a black walnut hat-rack.

“It’s a little chilly in here for you, I’m afraid,” said her host politely.

The day had been cool even out in the sunshine and they had been glad when their crackling fire was made on the river bank. But in this damp, big room there was a biting quality out of all proportion to the temperature outside.

“It’s not—at—all—cold,” stammered Peggy, through chattering teeth, trying to make her tone of everyday courtesy like that Mr. Huntington had used.

“I just wanted to invite you to something,” she plunged bravely into her mission. “It’s a special treat to be given by our cooking class of Andrews school.”

“To invite—?” Mr. Huntington looked vaguely puzzled and alarmed. “My dear young lady,” he protested, “I haven’t been invited to anything in twenty years.” Then an understanding look came over his face. “Oh, I see,” he murmured. “How much are the tickets?”

“Oh,” cried Peggy, hurt and chagrined, “oh, there are no tickets—oh, no, that’s not the way it is at all. You see the cooking class is—awfully proud of itself and we can stand burned hands and horrid blackened dishes that we couldn’t at first. And we can get awfully good dinners, too. So we thought that instead of just getting them up at school and eating them ourselves, we’d give a series of parties around at the homes of the girls and the trustees of the school and I—I thought we’d come and give one at your house, too,” she wound up breathlessly.

The old man looked as surprised as she could have hoped.

“But there is no young girl here who goes to the school,” he said finally, “and I am not a trustee.”

And all of a sudden the explanation that Peggy had thought so complete showed itself up at its true value, nothing at all.

“N—no,” she admitted, crestfallen, “that’s so.”

The misery in her face made Mr. Huntington want to do something for her.

“If the girls of the school simply want a place to give a party—is that it?—somewhere away from the school itself, where they can be more free,—I should be distinctly terrified at the presence of so many young ladies after so long a time of solitude, but still I think I might go through with it—why not let me give them a party, if they will be so kind as to cook the things I furnish?”

Peggy’s round eyes studied Mr. Huntington’s face thoughtfully. How people hated to admit they were poor! Here he was offering to buy enough food for a dozen hungry girls when he himself had barely enough to eke out a scanty meal from one week’s end to another, according to the girls’ stories.

“Oh,—please,” she hastened to put in. “That’s part of our course, knowing what to buy and all that, and we do so want to have a few real chances to use all the knowledge that is being pounded into us. If I can go back and tell those girls—” her breath caught in her throat for an instant at the prospect of such a triumphant moment, “if I can go back and tell those girls,” she repeated, “that we can give a party in Gloo—I mean here, why that will be the best time I’ve had this term!”

The old man was looking at her quizzically.

“For some reason you apparently want to very much,” he mused. “Well, you are the first person who has come to me in a number of years with the idea of giving something rather than taking. If only for that reason I should encourage you to have your way. For the last twenty years people have been coming to me now and then—whenever a certain rumor starts up afresh—wanting this, that and the other: subscriptions to charities, money to put their children through school: capital to start them in business. But I always tell them,” he chuckled softly, “I always let them know that I am very poor.”

Oh, then, he didn’t mind having folks know, after all. Peggy winced at the open way he spoke of it now, after all her efforts to conceal the fact that she knew his poverty.

“Oh,” she said uncomfortably, “you’re not very poor. I’m poor, too. My aunt sends me to school, but when I am graduated I’m going to earn my own living!” She shot it out at him, all breathless to see the effect of so astounding a piece of news. Something at once so tragic and so thrilling.

“You are?” queried the old man absently. “Well, I sometimes think those are the happiest days of a person’s life—the days of piling up their fortune—”

“Of—of—my goodness!” gasped Peggy. “I’m not dreaming of piling up a fortune. What could I do that would be worth very much? I’m going to—I’m going—to—”

“Yes?” asked the old man.

“I might teach something—they say I’m good in English, or I might—why I might cook. Wait until you’ve tried this dinner I want to get up for you and then maybe you can recommend me for a position as cook sometime—oh, now you see you must let us have the dinner.”

“I see it now, of course,” smiled Mr. Huntington. And then a look of real eagerness came over his lonely face. “What day had you—thought of for the festivities?” he asked.

“Oh,” began Peggy thoughtfully, “there are lots of good days for it—any Sunday or—”

Mr. Huntington murmured something, she wasn’t quite sure what. She paused inquiringly. She mustn’t let him know she suggested Sunday, because of its being a proverbially lonely day for people without family or friends, and if he had a different choice—

“Thanksgiving,” he was saying slowly to himself, so low that Peggy could hardly hear him. “Thanksgiving always is a—hard day to get through.”

“Hard! Why, it’s gorgeous! Oh, if we only can get our ice-box principal to let us, I’m sure the girls would love to give the dinner on Thanksgiving. It will give us an opportunity to learn how to fix turkey and cranberry and all those things. We will settle that, then, because I’ll tease my head off when I’m talking to Mrs. Forest—I’ll even kiss her if I have to, and in the end she’ll say ‘Bless you, my children, go and give your party.’”

“And I shall say bless you, too, I shouldn’t wonder,” murmured the old man, with a hint of a smile in his eyes. “It’s been eighteen years since Thanksgiving meant anything in this house. My daughter was here then, with her husband and baby son. But—”

Peggy looked around the dark, gloom-filled interior of the Huntington house and wondered where they were now, the rest of this family, that had cherished Thanksgiving day. But she did not want to ask and hurt Mr. Huntington’s feelings.

“Well,” she assured him eagerly, “we’ll just have a perfectly wonderful party. And I’ll bring my new chafing-dish and Katherine’s percolator and we’ll make the fudge and the coffee ourselves.”

“Fudge is a necessary part of the affair?” the old man smiled questioningly.

“Of course,” assented Peggy in surprise. “That was about the first thing I learned to do at Andrews,—make the most wonderful nut fudge and plain fudge and sea-foam.”

“And yet some people still cling to the idea that too much education for girls is dangerous,” murmured Mr. Huntington. “Now I shall be heartily in favor of it from this time forth.”

“I guess I’ll go back and tell the girls everything,” Peggy sighed contentedly, “they’ll want to begin planning the grinds right away. You won’t mind being ground, too, will you?”

“Aren’t you mistaking me for the coffee, young woman?” laughed her new friend. “That would be rather a mean trick to play on an old man, seems to me.”

Peggy’s face was scarlet. She did not know whether he was entirely in fun or not. The language of the school world was equipped with a strange vocabulary to outside ears, and she felt very guilty for letting Mr. Huntington fall into such a humiliating mistake.

“Grinds are just—gists,” she explained hastily, and went out of the door as Mr. Huntington held it open for her, with a sense of having made everything clear.

[CHAPTER V—MANAGING MRS. FOREST]

As Peggy started running back to the place she had left the girls, she became aware that someone in a blue Peter Thompson had come up the hill to wait for her, and was at the moment gazing intently toward Gloomy House, while the wind flapped her skirts and fluttered her hair free of its ribbon.

“Katherine, Katherine,” shouted Peggy, and the figure started to life at once and came tearing toward Peggy until they were like a couple of young express trains about to collide at full speed.

“I’ll save you, I’ll save you,” Katherine was crying breathlessly. “I’ll be there in a minute,—I’ll save you, dear.”

And then the collision happened.

“Oh, oh, oh,” gasped Peggy as she and Katherine rolled over each other, a whirling mélange of blue dress and red coat, down the steep slope of the river bank right into the midst of the waiting group of bacon batters.

Around them as they sat up, still seeing stars, and aching from the bumps newly raised on their foreheads to their scratched knees and ankles, arose a hubbub of questionings, consolations and reproaches.

“Oh, my—land!” moaned Peggy, winking the dust and bits of dried leaves out of her eyes. “I hope you don’t feel as badly as I do, Katherine. What made you say—” she spoke now in a puzzled tone, for full consciousness was coming back, “whatever made you say that you would—save me? Instead you nearly killed me, you know.”

“Why, I—ouch! my poor arm—I was going to save you from the ghosts and things at Gloomy House, of course,” answered Katherine indignantly. “You were gone so long and we were all so worried, that I climbed the top of the hill to see if I couldn’t make out what had become of you—and then there you were flying away from that awful place like mad, scared to pieces at something. Naturally, I hollered that I’d save you. What kind of a room-mate would I have been if I hadn’t?”

The tears suddenly started to Peggy’s eyes. She felt just at the moment, in spite of her bruises, all the beautiful thrill that is inspired by the discovery of absolute loyalty and affection in a room-mate. The autumn sunlight glinting down on Katherine’s yellow hair suddenly seemed to Peggy like a halo, and impulsively she reached toward her.

“It was fine of you, Katherine,” she said, “but I didn’t need saving—I was running because I was in a hurry to tell you people that the dinner is on. And Mr. Huntington doesn’t mind the grounds—I mean the grinds, but I’m so wounded I can’t talk straight,—and we’re to have it on Thanksgiving if Friend Forest will let us. Girls, he’s perfectly wonderful—”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Katherine, “and all that worry on my part for nothing.”

“And all your injuries for nothing, too,” sniggered Florence Thomas heartlessly. “You infants with your terribly impromptu manner of returning to our midst will be the death of me yet. Peggy, please draw a long, calm breath and then let us in on what really happened in Gloomy House.”

To an eager audience, then, Peggy told the whole outcome of her adventure, interrupting herself now and then to suggest, with some irrelevance certain dishes that would be particularly desirable as part of the dinner.

“Do you suppose Mrs. Forest will ever let us do such a novel sort of thing?” asked Katherine as the girls, after stamping out the remains of their little fire on the river rocks, gathered up their coats and sweaters to go back to the school.

“Not—for—a—minute.” Florence Thomas dashed their hopes with tones as firm as Mrs. Forest’s own might have been in speaking of the matter.

Peggy was rubbing her black and blue forehead thoughtfully.

“Peggy!” cried Katherine, “Florence doesn’t think Mrs. Forest will have it.”

Peggy smiled, a long, slow smile, and her black eyes narrowed to mere laughing slits. “She’ll be crazy about it,” she insisted.

It wasn’t until dinner time that the girls, in their dainty evening frocks, already seated at the various little tables, with the candles gleaming onto their flushed cheeks and powdered necks and arms through the pink candle shades, learned what Peggy intended to do to Mrs. Forest to make her prophecy come true. Some of the girls had declared she meant to try hypnotism, others poison, and some said she was planning to have the President of the United States wire that Mrs. Forest should yield to her will.

Peggy, herself, came in to dinner late. This in itself was an awful offense. Every head, blonde, dark and red-gold had long since been raised from the grace, and were bowed again, more enthusiastically, over the soup. Oh, the tiny little chiffon “swish” that rustled out from Peggy’s lovely blue frock, and the gentle, ladylike tap, tap of her pretty little blue slippers as she moved across the glazed floor of the dining-room and bent for an instant at Mrs. Forest’s place to whisper, “Pardon me,” rather as if she were conferring a favor by her notice than apologizing for a heinous sin. Then she slipped into her chair, which happened to be at Mrs. Forest’s very table, and sat, sweet and erect, with the soft candle light over her gold-glinting hair, in her radiant black eyes, and deepening the wonderful, sweeping color of her face. Her slender neck was delicate and proud as a princess’. The other girls’ fingers rested motionlessly on their soup spoons for an instant, during which they looked at their Peggy, spellbound. There was an air of graciousness, of regal beauty about her. There was no trace of the poor little Peggy who had once tried so hard to be a belle and had failed so miserably. This Peggy was lovely in some wonderful, heart-stopping fashion that made them all marvel.

Mrs. Forest’s eyes traveled over that graceful figure and the sternness gave way to something else. The little Miss Parsons was developing into the very type of girl to make Andrews most proud, she reflected.

Each year when June came she took the girls who had perfect records for behavior to Annapolis for one of the hops. When Peggy had come in late she was deciding Peggy should never hear the marine band under her auspices or dance with any lads in uniform. But as she considered what other girl in the school would do her so much honor as this wonderful, angelic appearing little creature, or whose program would be more eagerly filled by the good-looking young midshipmen who always crowded with enthusiasm around the Andrews girls?

“Mrs. Forest,” began Peggy in a worldly, conversational tone, after a few minutes, “isn’t the old Huntington place beautiful? And did you ever notice that large portrait in the hall—the Sargent?”

Mrs. Forest gasped. “In the hall?” she asked sharply, “IN the hall?”

Peggy nodded.

“Mr. Huntington belongs to one of our old aristocratic families, here, Miss Parsons,” the principal began pompously. “He is a very proud and very retiring sort of person. Since he lost the vast fortune of the Huntingtons he has never cared for society and no one is welcome in his house. Although I am acquainted with the members of all the first families here, I have not had occasion to meet Mr. Huntington—though we all know him by sight. And I should prefer that my young ladies did not demean themselves and me by peering in at the hall windows and ferreting out the Sargents on the wall.”

“O-oh,” breathed Peggy, with the tiniest little society sigh. “Mr. Huntington is a very good friend of mine and as I stopped in to talk a moment with him to-day—”

One of the girls choked and ignominiously thrust her napkin almost into her month to keep back the strange chortlings and chucklings that were trying to break forth.

Mrs. Forest’s eyes grew round, but her face had that set expression maintained by a person who wants to show no surprise whatever, even in the face of one of the greatest shocks of her life.

“He is a friend of yours?—I didn’t know,” she murmured, all honey.

“Yes, and he so approves of my being in this school,” continued Peggy, with a graceful little rushing eagerness. “He says he thinks we learn just the right things. I told him about the cand—I mean I told him the things we learn and he said he approved of higher education for girls. He would like to meet you, Mrs. Forest.”

“So?” said Mrs. Forest in rather pleased surprise. “Well, I never thought he cared about meeting anybody—did he say anything like that, really?”

“Say?—why, he wants us to go there for Thanksgiving dinner!” cried Peggy rapturously. “You and me and the whole school!”

The utter strangeness of any such desire on Mr. Huntington’s part,—its incredible suddenness—was already beginning to fade out in Mrs. Forest’s practical mind before the economic advantages such an invitation offered. Times were hard that year, and while she liked the girls to be wonderfully well satisfied with the holiday dinners at the school, nevertheless turkey, cranberries, pies, almonds ran expenses up greatly. In one stupendous jumble the necessary preparations had been oppressing her mind now for several days, and all the scratch pads on her desk were covered with scrawling figures indicating the amount of money it would take to put so elaborate a dinner through.

If anybody in the town was so markedly peculiar as to invite a whole school to Thanksgiving dinner, she felt an immediate inclination to take advantage of it.

Around the table as Peggy had finished speaking, and while Mrs. Forest toyed with her salad, went a barely audible chorus of groans from the girls. How could Peggy do such a short-sighted thing as to include their principal in the plan? She knew as well as anyone that her presence would spoil everything. In their hearts they had known that some one of the teachers would have to go along with them even if the impossible came true and they were allowed to give the party. But they had hoped it would be Miss Carrol, and that Mrs. Forest would be safely shaken off with her blightingly rigid ideas of discipline for at least that one day. Now Peggy had hopelessly gotten them into having her if they went at all. Peggy pretended not to notice their unhappy glances in her direction.

“That’s very kind of your friend,” Mrs. Forest was saying in a sugary voice. “I’m sure the school ought to feel honored at an invitation to Huntington House—”

“Gloomy house,” whispered Florence Thomas, who was sitting on the other side of Peggy.

Mrs. Forest frowned slightly. “To Huntington House,” she repeated mouthingly. “It used to be the center of all the social activities in the town a long time ago. But after the fortune went—and the daughter and her family went away—”

“Yes, wasn’t that too bad,” murmured Peggy. “His grandson is older than I am, now.”

“You know him, too?” asked Mrs. Forest quickly.

“No,” admitted Peggy. “I haven’t met him—yet.”

“You think Mr. Huntington was perfectly—serious in his invitation? It was a definite one?” Mrs. Forest asked thoughtfully.

“Yes, very,” Peggy assured her. “And we girls are going to cook the dinner,—to show what clever people you are training up in this school, you know.”

For Peggy had decided within herself that Mrs. Forest need not know that the girls were going to purchase the supplies for the dinner, also. If Mr. Huntington made a good impression on the principal just as things were, then let well enough alone, was her idea.

A curious, weighing look had crept into Mrs. Forest’s eyes. Peggy thought she was trying to decide whether or not to permit the girls to accept, and to go herself. But the principal’s next remark showed that she had already come way beyond that phase of the question and was actively considering even the remote advantages that might accrue as a result of their joint appearance at Huntington House on Thanksgiving day.

“Perhaps,” she said softly, “perhaps—Mr. Huntington’s affairs are turning out a bit better nowadays and he might be willing to donate fifty dollars to the new gymnasium we need so badly.”

Peggy put her hand over her mouth to stop the sudden exclamation of dismay that she must otherwise have uttered. The school did need a decent gymnasium, everybody knew that. And Mrs. Forest besought every rich girl who came to the school to interest her parents to the extent of getting them to give contributions. For five thousand dollars they could build a very nice one, large enough for their comparatively small school, and well enough equipped to start. Once in a while a girl in the spirit of generous affection for Andrews gave ten dollars or so out of her allowance, but the fund was not coming along very fast.

The idea of going to a party at Mr. Huntington’s house and then dunning that poor old man for a portion of the expense of building something in which he could really have not the least particle of interest was particularly repugnant to Peggy.

“Graft, Mrs. Forest,” she said daringly, shaking her finger and laughing a little. “Regular graft, and no fair.”

As Mrs. Forest flushed and tried to smile Peggy recalled the curious remark Mr. Huntington had made about people coming to him for money every time “certain rumors” came up afresh. She pondered over this.

“I will write a little note of acceptance,” Mrs. Forest mused.

And, after dinner, to the anguish of all the girls, she did.

“That was the only way she’d let us go,” Peggy told them all in self-defense, and then in the delight of definite plans their joy in the prospect returned.

[CHAPTER VI—THE BEAN AUCTION]

You wouldn’t have recognized Gloomy House if you had seen it before the Andrews girls’ ministrations and then walked into it in company with those gay young people on Thanksgiving noon. All spick and span and as gloomless as a house should be on that wonderful day, it was made cheery by leaping flames in the big fireplaces, and by gorgeous, flaunting chrysanthemums in tall vases. Mr. Huntington was all dressed up for the occasion and came forward to greet the guests, now in their best clothes, just as if he had not said good-by to most of them an hour earlier when they ran out the back door toward their school, clad in checked aprons and equipped with scrubbing brushes and brooms and mops.

Mrs. Forest, of course, had not been one of the broom brigade, nor of the more aristocratically occupationed cooking contingent, either. She swept magnificently into the room and gave Mr. Huntington a high handshake that was meant to impress him very much, but didn’t.

“I think the dinner is nearly ready,” called a gay little voice from the kitchen, and Peggy’s head was thrust through the doorway, all bright with its crooked dimples much in evidence. Her fair hair was curling moistly around her forehead and her face was all pink and hot from being so near the stove for so long a time.

“It’s been a terrible ordeal if you want to know it,” complained Florence Thomas, her assistant, laughing as they brought the dinner to the table. “I feel all sizzled up and roasted, and both my hands are cut and burned beyond recognition. But if anyone ever saw such a wonderful dinner before, I envy them the experience, that’s all.”

The long-unused table at Huntington House was one of the most gorgeous sights that the hungry eyes of school-girls ever beheld. Mr. Huntington himself looked as if he could hardly believe he was awake when he saw its lavish magnificence.

The girls in their enthusiasm had given the dinner many touches that more experienced housewives would never have happened to think of. The color scheme was golden orange and brown. The center-piece was a triumphant pumpkin hollowed out and scalloped and laden with oranges, grapes, and very red apples. The turkey smoked in the middle of the table with the vegetable dishes clustered around it. And in most beautiful script, worked out in nuts and stem raisins arranged on the tablecloth, was the word “Thanksgiving.”

At each place was the “grind” with the person’s name on it, and such shrieks of laughter as filled the room while the girls, the principal and the old man trouped around the table reading the funny legends, examining the ridiculous souvenirs appended, all in a hurried and eager endeavor to find their own places! Not nearly all of the girls could sit at the table—there were sixty in the school,—but the grinds were arranged near together and then each girl took her plate with a plentiful helping of everything and sat down in one of the chairs by the fireplace or against the wall of the great dining-room.

Mr. Huntington was not “ground” so very badly, after all. He found at his place a quaint little box painted to represent a house, with tiny doors and windows marked on it. It bore the legend “Gloomy House,” and falling from the door were weird little pasteboard roly-poly objects labeled “Glooms.” These were flat but stood erect by virtue of wee standards at the back pasted to the paper yard of the house. They were in all attitudes of scurrying away with ridiculous faces expressing grief. A slip of paper invited: “Lift the roof of Gloomy House and see why the Glooms flee.”

Mr. Huntington laughed with the rest, but his hand slightly trembled as he slowly lifted the roof of the little pasteboard house. Inside were sixty fudge hearts and a further assurance, “Sixty hearts of sixty girls.”

Could it be possible that there were tears in his eyes to make them glisten suddenly like that? Peggy looked down at her grind to hide the sudden swift seriousness that passed over her own face, when her eyes met something so incredible that she burst into shrieks of laughter. She had prepared most of the grinds with the others, but of course hers had been kept a secret and she had not seen it until this minute. Hers and Katherine’s were in one, being nothing more nor less than two smashed dolls somewhat jumbled up in appearance, one wearing a blue Peter Thompson and the other a red coat. There were black and blue bumps painted on their dented foreheads. Around the waist of the red-coated doll went a ribbon on which was lettered frantically,

“S.O.S., S.O.S.”

And around the blue-dressed one a ribbon declared,

“I’ll save you! I’ll save you.”

The verse that accompanied it went as follows:

“Humpty and Dumpty met on a hill.

Humpty and Dumpty had a great spill.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty or Dumpty together again.”

When full duty had been done to the main dinner the beautiful pumpkin and mince pies that were Katherine Foster’s own effort were brought in with wild cheers to greet them, that not even the pokes and taps and frowns of Mrs. Forest could do anything to check.

“Miss Parsons—” began Mr. Huntington, rising in his place.

“Peggy,” she corrected from the other end of the room.