"God rest you, merry Christians,Let nothing you dismay,For Christ our Lord and SaviourWas born on Christmas Day."
Lloyd liked that carol. "'Let nothing you dismay,'" she repeated, softly. "No, it doesn't really make any difference what happens," she thought, closing her eyes again and curling up like a sleepy kitten. "It will all come right in the end, as it did with Miss Gilmer. I'll not worry about missing so many lessons and so many pearls on my rosary. I'll just be thankful for Christmas and all it brings."
Again through her drowsy senses echoed the refrain, and she dropped to sleep, repeating, slowly, "'Let—nothing—you—dismay!'"
"Thisis the worst time of all the yeah to be sick," fretted the Little Colonel, pausing in her restless journey around the room. She had been pacing from window to fireplace in the nurse's office, and from fireplace to window again, watching the clock and the slowly westering sun, as if watching would hasten the day to its close.
Miss Gilmer, who was placidly knitting, changed needles without looking up. "That is what people always say. I've never yet found one whose calendar had a time when illness would be convenient."
"But now, just befoah the holidays, a thousand things are waiting to be done. I'm behind a whole week with my studies, and my Christmas presents that I'm going to make are scarcely begun. You haven't even let me look at the material. I feel like a caged lion, and I'd like to roah and claw and ramp around till I'd smashed my bah's."
"You'll have your liberty soon," laughed Miss Gilmer. "I think it will be safe to let you go down to the dining-room this evening, and I'll give you your honourable discharge in the morning. But, if I were in your place, I would make no attempt to catch up with the classes this term. I would lock the unfinished presents away in a drawer, and not give any this Christmas. You ought to spend the holidays as quietly as possible, doing nothing but rest."
Lloyd turned toward her with an exclamation of dismay.
"Oh, Miss Gilmer! That's impossible! We've planned for a gayer Christmas vacation than we've evah had befoah. Every day will be full to the brim. And Imustmake up the recitations I have missed. I've had such good repoah'ts all term that I can't beah to spoil everything right at the end. When I was in bed, feeling so bad, I made up my mind I wouldn't worry about them, but now I feel as good as new, only a little weak, and one always feels weak aftah fevah. It's to be expected. You know I wasn't dangerously ill."
"No," admitted Miss Gilmer, "but your little illness has left you with less strength than you think you have. You are like an ice-pond that is justbeginning to freeze over. A very light weight will break it through at that stage, but if there is no strain until it has frozen properly, it can bear the weight of the most heavily loaded wagons."
Lloyd slipped into a chair and stared dismally at the fire.
"But I am strongah than you think, Miss Gilmer. Except one time when I had the measles, I'd never been sick in my life till last week. I don't believe it's good for people to coddle themselves and worry all the time for feah they are going to be ill."
"Oh," answered the nurse, "I fully agree with you in that, still I should not be doing my duty if I did not put up a warning signal when I see danger ahead. I do see it now. You are getting on very nicely, but the ice is very thin,—far too thin for any such extra weights as double study hours and holiday dissipations. If you don't walk lightly, there'll be a nervous breakdown."
Some one called Miss Gilmer away before she could finish her warning, and Lloyd sat facing the fire and this unpleasant bit of counsel for nearly half an hour. A verse from her favourite carol came echoing through the halls from the distant music-room, for it was practice hour again, but this time it did not fit her mood, and it brought no cheer.It was all well enough for those girls up-stairs, happy and well and able to do as they pleased, to be singing "Letnothingyou dismay," but she couldn't help being dismayed at Miss Gilmer's opinion of her condition. She was ready to cry, thinking how all her holidays would be spoiled should she follow the nurse's advice.
With her chin in her hand and her elbow on the arm of the chair, she sat picturing her doleful Christmas if she could have no part in the giving, and must be left out of all the merrymaking they had planned. Tears welled up into her eyes, and her miserable reverie might have ended in a downpour had it not been interrupted by the entrance of Gay and Betty. Having taken a hasty run across the terraces, they had obtained permission to spend the rest of the recreation hour with Lloyd.
"We can't waste a minute now," exclaimed Gay, as she pulled out her knitting-work and began clicking her ivory needles through a rainbow shawl she was making. "I believe Betty sleeps with her embroidery hoops under her pillow, and I know that Allison paints in her sleep."
"What would you do if you were in my place?" mourned Lloyd. She repeated the nurse's dismal warning.
"Boo! She magnifies her office," said Gay, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that they were alone. "I suppose it is perfectly natural that she should. When you're with Miss White, she makes you feel that there's nothing in life to live for but Latin. When you're with Miss Hooker, mathematics is the chief end of man. With Professor Stroebel the violin is the one and only. So of course a professional nurse is in duty bound to make hygiene the first consideration. Don't listen to them, listen to me. I change my mind a dozen times a day, and have a new fad every fortnight, so it stands to reason that my advice is more broad-minded than the advice of a person who rides only one hobby, and rides that in a rut."
Lloyd laughed at Gay's foolishness, but groaned when Betty told her how far the classes had advanced during her absence from recitations.
"I'll have to work like a beavah this next week to catch up. I stah'ted out to have perfect repoah'ts, and I feel that I must stick to it, as Ederyn did when he heard the king's call. It is an obligation that Imustmeet. I must keep tryst or die."
Gay looked at her admiringly. "I knew you were like that," she exclaimed. "If there is anything I envy it is strength of character."
The admiring glance and Gay's remark carried greater weight than all the nurse's warning. There was another reason now for persevering in her determination. Gay expected it of her, and she could not fall below Gay's expectation of what a strong character should accomplish.
Gay, having finished a white stripe across the shawl, opened the sweet-grass Indian basket hanging on her chair-post, and took out several skeins of zephyr of a delicate sea-shell pink.
"Let me hold it while you wind," begged Lloyd. "It's such an exquisite shade, like the heart of a la France rose. It makes me think of the stories mothah used to tell me. Everything in them had to be pink, from the little girl's dress to the bow on her kitten's neck. Her slippahs, parasol, flowahs in the garden, papah on the wall, icing on the cake, everything had to be pink."
"What a funny little creature you must have been," laughed Gay, secretly making note of Lloyd's favourite colour, and resolving to change the names on two packages laid away in her trunk. The blue sachet-bag with the forget-me-nots should go to Betty instead of Lloyd, as she had originally intended. Lloyd should have the one with the garlands of pink rosebuds.
"My room at home is furnished in pink," Lloyd went on. "Oh, Gay, I'm wild for you to see Locust. I'm going to have you and the Walton girls and Katie Mallard, one of our neighbahs, spend two days and nights with us. While I've been cooped up heah getting well, I've planned some of the loveliest things to do that you evah dreamed of. It's going to be the gayest vacation that evah was."
When Miss Gilmer returned at the end of the hour, Lloyd looked so much brighter and better that she gave her an unexpected furlough.
"There, run along to your room with the other girls. I'll expect you back at bedtime, for I want to keep you under my wing one more night, but you're at liberty till then on one condition,—you're not to look into a book."
"I'll promise! Oh, I'll promise!" cried Lloyd, impetuously throwing her arms around the nurse. "You'resucha deah! Not that I'm anxious to get away from you," she added, fearing that her delight might be misunderstood. "But I just want to getout!"
True to her promise, Lloyd opened no books, but, flying to her room, she took out one of the uncompleted Christmas gifts, a pair of bedroom slippers, and worked with feverish haste until dinnerwas ready. It was good to be at the table again with the other girls after her week of solitary meals in the nursery. Afterward it was a temptation to linger in the library talking with them, but the thought of the many tasks undone sent her hurrying back to her room.
Betty followed presently with the Walton girls, and they all worked steadily on their various gifts until the bell rang for the evening study hour. Then Allison and Kitty reluctantly departed, and Betty took out her algebra. Lloyd crocheted in silence for half an hour longer, her fingers flying faster and faster in her eagerness to complete the task. Finally she laid it down with a sigh of relief.
"There!" she exclaimed aloud. "That's done. They're all ready for the bows. Now, thank fortune, I can check them off my list."
Betty looked up with an absent-minded smile, nodded approvingly at the finished slippers standing on the table, and then went on with her problems. Lloyd opened her bureau-drawer to search for the ribbon which she had bought for the bows. As she rummaged through it, her hand touched the little sandalwood box that held the unfinished rosary. She glanced over her shoulder. Betty was deep in her algebra. So, taking out the string ofbeads, she passed it slowly through her fingers. Then she held it up, and, looping it around her throat, looked in the mirror.
"I suppose it's mighty childish of me," she said to herself, "but I can't enjoy my vacation if I go home with a single one of this term's pearls missing. I'vegotto make up those lessons, no mattah what the nurse says. I can rest aftahward."
A few minutes later she presented herself at Miss Gilmer's door with the announcement that she would go to bed an hour earlier than usual, in order to get a good start for the next day.
All that week she worked with a restless energy that kept her keyed to the highest pitch of effort. She scarcely ate, and her sleep was broken, but her eyes were so bright and her manner so animated, that Betty wrote home that Lloyd's little spell of illness seemed to have done her good.
By studying before breakfast, and snatching every minute she could spare from other duties, she managed to have perfect recitations in each study, and at the same time to make up the lessons she had missed. Five o'clock Saturday afternoon found her with the last task done. She slipped ten more little Roman pearls over the silken cord; five for the week's advance work, and five for thedays she had missed. Then with a sigh of relief she put the sandalwood box into her trunk, already partly packed for home-going, and flung herself wearily across the bed.
The mock Christmas tree had been lighted the evening before, and the gifts distributed. She had not enjoyed it as she had expected to, although some of the jokes were excruciatingly funny, and the girls had laughed until they were limp. She was too tired to laugh much. She was glad that Sunday was coming before the day of leave-taking. She made up her mind that she would skip dinner, and ask Betty just to slip her something from the table.
Then she remembered that this was the night the carols were to be sung in the chapel. She could not miss that. It was the prettiest service of all the year, the old girls said. Some one had told her it was a custom for everybody to wear white to the carol-singing, but it was hard to remember things, maybe she had only dreamed it. She wished that she did not have to remember things, but could lie there without moving, until morning. What was it her mother used to sing to her? "Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas." Oh! The white seal's lullaby. That was what shewanted. How good it would feel to be rocked by the restful motion of the waves, to be caught in that long sleepy sweep of the slow-swinging seas.
When she opened her eyes again it was to find the room lighted, and Betty dressing for the carol service. She had slept an hour.
"It'll never do to miss the carols," Betty assured her, when she suggested skipping dinner. "Come on, I'll help you dress. Just tell me what you want to wear, and I'll lay out your things while you're shaking your wits together. You'll feel better after you've had a hot dinner." So struggling with the weariness which nearly overpowered her, Lloyd forced herself to follow Betty's example, and go down to the dining-room when the bell rang. An hour later she fell into line with the other girls, as, all in white, they filed into the chapel.
"How Christmasey it looks and smells," she whispered to Allison, as the doors swung open and a breath from the pine woods greeted them. The chancel was wreathed and festooned with masses of evergreen. To-night tall white candles furnished the only light. Far down the dim aisles they twinkled like stars against the dark background of cedar and hemlock.
Betty was glad that they had entered early. The deep silence of those moments of waiting, the dim light of the Christmas tapers, and the fragrance of the pine seemed as much a part of the service as anything which followed. In the expectant hush that filled the little chapel, she pictured the three kings riding through the night, until she could almost see the shadowy desert and hear the tread of the camels who bore the wise men on their starlit quest. She saw the hillside of Judea, where the shepherds kept their night-watch by their flocks, and all the mystery and wonder of the first great Christmastide seemed to vibrate through her heart, as the deep organ prelude suddenly filled the air with the jubilant chords of "Joy to the world, the Lord has come."
Presently the music changed, and the girls looked around expectantly. From far down distant halls and corridors came a chorus of girlish voices: "Oh, little town of Bethlehem." So sweet and far away it was, the audience in the chapel involuntarily leaned forward to listen. Across the campus it sounded, gradually drawing nearer and clearer, until, with a triumphant burst of melody, the doors swung open and the white-robed choir swept in.
Only the best voices in the school had been chosenfor this choir, and weeks of training preceded the service. One after another they sang the sweet old tunes of the Christmas waits until they reached Lloyd's favourite, "Let nothing you dismay." She listened to it with pleasure now, since her greatest cause for dismay had been removed. She had kept tryst with the term's obligations, as the last pearl on the rosary could testify.
In the hush that followed that carol, an old man, with silvery hair and benign face, rose under the tall candles of the chancel.
"It's the bishop," whispered Gay to Lloyd. "Old Bishop Chartley. He is Madam's uncle, and he always comes down for this service."
Then even her irrepressible tongue grew still, for, in a deep voice that filled the chapel, he began to read the story of the three wise men who followed the star with their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, until it led them to Bethlehem's manger. An old, old story, but it bloomed anew once more, as it has bloomed every year since first the wondering wise men started on their quest.
The bishop closed the Book. "How shall we keep the King's birthday?" he asked. "What gifts shall we bring? To-day in a quaint old tale, beloved in boyhood, I found the answer. It is thestory of a strange country called Cathay, and this is the way it runs:
"'The ruler thereof is one Kublan Khan, a mighty warrior. His government is both wise and just, and is administered to rich and poor alike, without fear or favour. On the king's birthday the people observe what is called the White Feast. Then are the king and his court assembled in a great room of the palace, which is all white, the floor of marble and the walls hung with curtains of white silk. All are in white apparel, and they offer unto the king white gifts, to show that their love and loyalty are without a stain. The rich bring to their lord pearls, carvings of ivory, white chargers, and costly broidered garments. The poor present white pigeons and handfuls of rice. Nor doth the great king regard one gift above another, so long as all be white. And so do they keep the king's birthday.'"
Lloyd, leaning forward, listened with such breathless interest that it attracted Gay's attention. "That's just like your pink story," she whispered. Lloyd gave her fingers a responsive squeeze, but never took her eyes from the benign old face. The bishop was applying the story to the audience before him.
"As these pagans of Cathay kept the feast of Kublan Kahn, so we may make of Christmas a White Feast, whose offerings are without stain. We need make no weary pilgrimages across the trackless sands, as did those Eastern sages. 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren' (these are the King's own words), 'ye have done it unto me.' At our very doors we may give to Him, through His poor and needy.
"But there is another way. You are all familiar with the motto of this house, and the legend which gave rise to it. Clad in the white garments of Righteousness, we may keep the tryst as Ederyn kept it, and bring to the King the white pearls of a well-spent life. Days unstained by selfishness, days filled up with duties faithfully performed. It matters not how small and commonplace our efforts seem, the rice and the pigeons of the poor showed Kublan Kahn his subjects' loyalty as fully as the ivory carvings and the costly broidered garment. Nor doth the great King regard one gift of ours above another, so long as all be white. If only on our breasts the tokens Duty gives us spell out the words, 'semper fidelis,' then ours will be the royal accolade: 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thyLord.' To giveourselves, unstained and gladly, thus may we keep the White Feast on the birthday of the King."
Then the choir stood again, but Lloyd scarcely noticed what it sang. She was thinking of the bishop's story, and her secret hidden away in the sandalwood box. She was so glad now that she had strung the pearls. She had begun it because it pleased her fancy to act out the story of Ederyn, but now the sacred meaning the old bishop gave the story thrilled her through and through. The King's call suddenly seemed very sweet and personal. Henceforth she would string the pearls in answer to that call.
When they all knelt in the closing prayer, she fervently echoed the bishop's petition: "Grant that we make of this Christmastide a White Feast, and that all our days may be worthy of thy acceptance, unstained by selfishness and full of deeds to show our love and loyalty."
The white-robed choir filed slowly out, their music sounding fainter and fainter until it died away across the campus, and the white-robed audience was left kneeling in silence. There were tears in Gay's eyes when she arose. Such music always stirred her to the depths. Kitty went back to herroom humming one of the carols, and Betty stole away to write the bishop's sermon in her little white record, while the memory of it was still warm in her heart.
At Miss Gilmer's request, Lloyd waited a moment in the vestibule. At first she wished that Miss Gilmer had not detained her. She wanted to go on with Allison, who had her by the arm. Afterward, however, she was glad of the waiting. It gave her an opportunity to meet the venerable bishop.
"So you are going home to-morrow for the holidays," he said, genially, as he held out his hand. "Godspeed, daughter. May you keep the White Feast with joy."
It seemed to Lloyd that that "Godspeed" followed her like a benediction.
"O Warwick Hall, dear Warwick Hall,Thy happy hours we'll oft recall!No time or change can break thy tie,Though for awhile we say good-bye—Good-bye! Good-bye!"
Amida flutter of handkerchiefs and a babel of parting cries, each 'bus-load of girls departed from the Hall to the station singing the farewell song of the school.
A dozen times on the way home Allison, humming it unconsciously, found the rest of the party joining in. It was an uneventful journey, but a merry one to the five girls, travelling for the first time without a chaperon. For the first few hours they had the observation car to themselves. Even the porter mysteriously disappeared.
"He's curled up asleep somewhere, rest his soul," said Gay, when she had rung for him several times.
"All the better," answered Kitty. "We don't really need the table, and it's nice to have him outof the way. This is as good as travelling in a private car. We can 'stand on our head in our little trundle-bed, and nobody nigh to hinder.' Oh, girls, I'm so crazy glad that we're on our way home that I'm positively obliged to do something to let off steam. I've exhausted my vocabulary trying to express my delight, so there's nothing left but to howl."
"Or to wriggle," suggested Gay. "Why not try facial expression? How is this for transcendent joy?"
The grotesque smile which she turned upon them was so ridiculous that they screamed with laughter.
"Oh, Gay, do stop!" begged Betty. "You're as bad as a comic valentine."
"I'd like to see you do any better," retorted Gay.
"Let's all try," suggested Kitty. "Line up in front of this mirror, girls. Now all look pleasant, please. Now let your smiles express rapture. Now, frenzied delight!"
Fascinated by their own ugliness, the five girls stood in a row distorting their pretty faces with hideous grins and grimaces until they were weak from laughing. The banging of the car door sent them scuttling into their seats. A portly old gentleman passed through the car to the rear platform,and, slamming the door behind him, stood looking down the rapidly vanishing track. Evidently it was too breezy a view-point for the old gentleman, even with his coat-collar turned up and hat pulled down to meet his ears, for in a moment he came in and passed back to his seat in a forward car. The girls sat demurely looking out of the windows until he was gone, then they faced each other, giggling.
"Suppose he had caught us making those idiotic faces," exclaimed Allison. "He would have taken us for a lot of escaped lunatics."
"No, he wouldn't," insisted Gay. "He was a real benevolent-looking old fellow, the kind that understands young people, and he'd know that it was just that Christmas has gone to our heads, and made us a little flighty. I'm sure that his name is James, and that he has six old maid daughters. He lives out West, and he's taking home a trunk full of presents for them."
"Let's guess what he has for them," said Kitty. "I'll say that the oldest one is named Emmaline, and he is taking her a squirrel fur muff."
"And the next one is Agnes Dorothea," said Betty, taking her turn, as if it were a game. "She's the delicate one of the family, and a sort of invalid. So he bought her a lavender shoulder shawl thatcaught his fatherly eye in a show window, because it was so soft and fluffy. But it will shrink and fade the first time it is washed till Agnes Dorothea will look like a homeless cat if she wears it. Still she will persist in putting it on because dear father brought it to her from Washington."
"He'd certainly think you all were crazy if he could heah yoah remah'ks," laughed Lloyd.
"Speaking of shawls," cried Gay, "that reminds me of that rainbow shawl in my bag. I haven't taken a stitch in it since we started, and I intended to knit all the way home. I simply have to, if I'm to get it done in time."
Taking out the square of linen in which the fleecy zephyr was wrapped, she settled herself by the rear window in a big arm-chair, with her feet drawn up under her, and fell to work with all her might.
"It's so nice and cosy to have the car all to ourselves," sighed Allison, stretching out luxuriously on the sofa. Betty, bending over her embroidery, smiled tenderly at a picture that her memory showed her just then. She was comparing this journey with the first one she had ever taken. And she saw in her thoughts a little brown-eyed girl of eleven, setting forth on her first venture into thewide world, with a sunbonnet tied over her curls, and an old-fashioned covered basket on her arm. What a dread undertaking that journey had been from the Cuckoo's Nest to the House Beautiful. She remembered how frightened she was, and how she had studied the picture of Red Ridinghood, printed in colours on the border of her handkerchief, until she was afraid to speak even to the conductor. She saw a possible wolf in every stranger.
Somehow her thoughts kept going back to that time, even in the midst of Gay's most amusing nonsense, and Kitty's brightest repartee. Even when Allison began to sing "O Warwick Hall," and she chimed in with the others, "Dear Warwick Hall," she was not thinking of school, but of the Cuckoo's Nest, and Davy, and the old weather-beaten meeting-house, in whose window she had passed so many summer afternoons, reading the musty dog-eared books she found in the little red bookcase.
"What are you smiling about, Betty, all to yoahself?" asked Lloyd. "You look as if you are a thousand miles away."
Betty glanced up with a little start. "Oh, I was just thinking about the Cuckoo's Nest, and wishingthat I could see Davy's face when they open the Christmas box I sent. There are only trifles in it, but the box will mean a lot to them, for Cousin Hetty never has time to make anything of Christmas."
Lloyd sat up with a sudden exclamation. "Oh, Betty, Ibegyoah pah'don. There's a lettah for you in my bag from some of them that I forgot to give you. Hawkins came up with it just as we drove off, and there was so much excitement and confusion I nevah thought of it again till this minute. I'm mighty sorry I forgot."
"It doesn't make any difference," Betty assured her. "Good news can afford to wait, and, if it's bad news, it would have spoiled all the first part of this trip."
She tore open the envelope and glanced down the page. Lloyd, looking up, saw a distressed expression cross her face and the brown eyes fill with tears.
"Oh, it's poor little Davy that's in trouble," said Betty, answering Lloyd's anxious question. "He had his leg badly hurt last week, broken in two places. He was riding one of those heavy old farm horses, hurrying home to get out of a storm. Going down a steep, slippery hill, it stumbled and fellon him. He'll have to lie in bed for weeks, with his knee in plaster, and he's so tired of it already, andsolonesome. Nobody has any time to sit with him. I know how it is. I was sick myself once at the Cuckoo's Nest. Oh, I'd give anything if I could spend my vacation there with him."
"And give up all your good times at home?" cried Kitty. "He surely couldn't expect such a sacrifice as that."
"But it wouldn't be any sacrifice. Not a mite! I haven't seen him for such a long time, and I'd love to go. He used to be the dearest little fellow, never out of my sight a moment during the day. They used to call him 'Betty's shadow.'"
"Why don't you go if you wish it so much?" was on the tip of Gay's tongue, but she stopped the question just before it slipped off, remembering Betty's dependence on her godmother. Kitty had told her all about it one time. Naturally she wouldn't want to ask for the money, even for such a short journey, when so much was being spent to keep her at school with Lloyd; and naturally she would not want to ask to leave Locust at Christmas, when that was the time of all the year when she could be of service, and in many ways add greatly to the pleasure of the entire household.
The nonsense stopped for a few minutes. No one knew what to say to comfort Betty, although they were genuinely sorry, and glanced from time to time at the brown head turned away from them toward the window. She was looking at the flying landscape through a blur of tears, recalling the way little Davy's dimpled fingers had clung to hers, his chubby feet followed her. Of course he was much larger and older, she told herself, not at all like the little fellow she had left so long ago. He was big enough to stand pain now, and probably the worst of his suffering was over. Still, she saw only a solemn baby face when she pictured him, and heard only the lisping voice, saying as he used to say when stumped toe or bruised finger brought the tears: "It hurth your Davy boy. Tie a wag on it, Betty." How he had loved her stories! What a pleasure they would be to him now in the long days he would be forced to spend in bed.
Suddenly conscious of the silence around her, Betty turned, realizing that her depression had cast a shadow on the spirits of all the rest.
"Don't think about my bad news any more," she said, brightly. "It probably isn't half as bad as I have been picturing it. My imagination always runs away with me. It isn't Davy the baby that'shad such an awful accident. It was that thought that hurt me so at first. I keep forgetting that it's five years since I left there. I'm going to drop him a postal card at the next station. I can write to him every day, and make a sort of game of the letters with riddles and suggestions of things for him to do, and that will help the time pass."
"First call to dinnah in the dinah," called a coloured waiter, passing through the car in white jacket and apron.
"Now we'll have to stop all our foolishness," said Allison, sedately, as she rose to lead the way to the dining-car. They followed as decorously as grandmothers, each realizing the responsibility that devolved on her, since they were travelling without a chaperon.
To be sure, Gay choked on an olive when Kitty made some wicked remark about the fussy old woman across the aisle, who wouldn't be pleased with anything the waiter brought her; and it was too much for their gravity when an excessively dignified man at the next table, who had been staring at the wall like a wooden Indian, suddenly sneezed so violently that his eye-glasses dropped into his soup with a splash.
Otherwise they were models of propriety, andmore than one head turned to look at the bright girlish faces, and smile at the keen, unspoiled enjoyment which they evidently found in life and in each other.
They did not stay long in the observation-car when they went back to it after dinner. Other people had come in, and it was not so attractive as when they occupied it alone. The lamps had been lighted so early that short December day that it seemed much later than it really was, and they were all tired. At nine o'clock, when they went to their berths in the forward end of the car, they found several sections already made up for the night, and the porter was moving on down toward theirs.
The fussy old woman, who had been so hard to please at the table, came squeezing her way through the valises that blocked the aisle, and took possession of the section opposite Betty and Lloyd.
"Oh, my country!" whispered Lloyd. "I wondah if she's going to keep up that grumbling and scolding all night. I'm glad that I am not that poah henpecked maid of hers. She certainly makes life misahable for her."
It was nearly two hours before Jenkins, the long-suffering maid, succeeded in settling her mistressto her satisfaction behind the curtains of her berth. The girls made no attempt to get into the dressing-room until the little comedy was over. They laughed until they were hysterical over each scene as it occurred. A comedy in three acts, Betty called it—the losing of the cold-cream bottle and the finding of same in madam's overshoe. The unavailing search for a certain black silk handkerchief in which madam was wont to tie her head up in of nights, and the substitution of a towel instead, which the porter obligingly brought.
Next there was a supposed case of poisoning, Jenkins in her trepidation having administered three pink pellets from a bottle instead of two white ones from a box. Five minutes' reign of terror after that mistake brought the poor maid to a witless state that left her almost helpless. Various trips were made to the dressing-room, at which times the old lady's face was massaged, her grizzly hair rolled on crimping-pins, and her shoulders rubbed with an evil-smelling liniment which permeated the whole car. She seemed as oblivious to the presence of the other passengers as if she were on a desert island, and, being somewhat deaf, made Jenkins repeat her timid replies louder and louder until they were almost screaming at each other.
Every one on the car was smiling broadly when at last she subsided behind the curtains. The smiles grew to audible mirth when she confided in a loud voice to Jenkins, stowed away in the berth above her, that she hoped to goodness nobody on board would snore and keep her awake.
Jenkins's answer, floating tremulously down, convulsed the sleepy girls: "Hi 'ope not, ma'am. Hit's a bad 'abit, ma'am, halmost, you might say, han haffliction."
"What?" came in a thunderous voice from the lower berth, and Jenkins, craning her head turtle-wise over the edge of her bed, called back in a tremulous squeak: "Hi honly said as 'ow hit were a bad 'abit, ma'am!"
"Hump!" was the answer. "See that you don't do it yourself. I've got my umbrella here ready to punch you if you do."
A titter ran from seat to seat. The girls, unable to stifle their amusement any longer, seized their bags and hurried down the aisle to the dressing-room, where, under cover of the rattle of the train, they could laugh as freely as they pleased.
When Lloyd and Betty stole back to their berths a few minutes later, they looked at each other with an amused smile. From the opposite section camean unmistakable sound, long-drawn and penetrating as a cross-cut saw. Madam was evidently asleep. Betty giggled, as from Jenkins's perch came a gentle echo.
"'Hi honly said as 'ow hit were a bad 'abit, ma'am,'" whispered Lloyd. "Wouldn't you love to jab the old lady herself with an umbrella?"
Gay, in the dressing-room, was carefully counting over her toilet articles, as she put them back into her bag. "Soap-box, comb, nail-file, tooth-powder—I haven't lost a thing this trip, Allison. I'm beginning to feel proud of myself. Here's my watch and here's my tickets, buttoned up in this pocket. Mamma had it made on purpose, so in case of a wreck at night I'd have them on me. She patted the pocket sewed securely in the dark blue silk robe she wore, made in loose kimono fashion.
"Now I'm all ready," she added, dropping her shoes into her bag and closing it. In her soft Indian moccasins, beaded like a squaw's, she executed a little heel and toe dance in the narrow passage outside, while she waited for Allison to gather up her clothes and follow. She thought every one else was in bed, and when suddenly the outside door opened and she heard some one coming in from thenext car, she flew down the aisle like a frightened rabbit.
It was only a brakeman who stood just inside the door a moment with his lantern, and then went out again. All the lights had been turned down in the car, and Gay stumbled several times over shoes and valises protruding in the aisle. But finally, with a bound, she made her escape, as she supposed, from whoever it was that had caught her dancing in her moccasins in the passage.
She gave a headlong dive into her berth. Just then the car lurched forward, sending her bag banging against the window, but she did not loosen her hold of it, and she was still clinging to it five minutes later.
For, with a scream of terror, she rolled out of the berth far faster than she had rolled in. It was madam's fat body that writhed under her, and her stern voice that yelled "Murder! murder!" in a voice calculated to wake the dead.
"'Elp! 'elp!" screamed Jenkins from the upper berth, afraid to look out between the curtains, but bravely pushing the button of the porter's bell till some one, wakened by the cries and persistent ringing, wildly called "Fire!"
"'I TELL YOU SOMEBODY WAS TRYING TO SANDBAG ME'""'I TELL YOU SOMEBODY WAS TRYING TO SANDBAG ME'"
"It's train robbahs!" gasped Lloyd, sitting up.Little cold shivers ran up and down her back, but she was conscious of a pleasant thrill of excitement. Heads were thrust out all up and down the aisle. The bell and the cries of murder and 'elp never stopped until the porter and Pullman conductor came running to the rescue.
But there was nothing for them to see. At the first yell, Gay had tumbled hastily out, still clinging to her bag. Before the old lady had sufficiently recovered from her surprise enough to wonder what sort of a wild beast had pounced in upon her, Gay was safe in her own berth, drawn up in a knot, and trembling behind her closely buttoned curtains. Her heart beat so loud that she thought it would certainly betray her.
"You must have had the nightmare," said the conductor, politely, trying not to smile as the angry face, under its towel turban, glared out at him.
"Nightmare!" blazed the irate old lady. "I'm no fool. Don't you suppose that I know when I'm hit? I tell you somebody was trying to sandbag me. I thought a Saratoga trunk had fallen in on me. It's your business to take care of passengers on this train, and I intend to hold the company responsible. I shall certainly sue the railroad for this shock to my nervous system as soon as I gethome. I have a weak heart and I can't stand such performances as this."
It took a long time to pacify her. Gay lay in her berth, shaking first with fright and then with laughter. She could not go to sleep without sharing her secret with the other girls, but she was afraid to trust herself to speak. She had grown almost hysterical over the affair. Finally she crept in beside Lloyd to whisper, brokenly: "Iam the nightmare that sandbagged the old lady.Iam the Saratoga trunk that fell on her. Oh, Lloyd, I'll never brag again. I had just told Allison I hadn't lost a single thing this trip, and then I turned around and lost myself. I got into the wrong berth. Oh! oh! It was so funny to see her, all done up in that towel. It'll kill me if I can't stop laughing."
She crept back to her own side of the aisle again, and Lloyd got up to repeat it to Betty and Allison, who passed it on to Kitty. It was nearly half an hour before they stopped giggling over it, and then Kitty started them all afresh by leaning out to say, in a stage whisper, as a certain duet was renewed by Jenkins and her mistress, "'Hi honly said as 'ow hit were a bad 'abit.'"
It was snowing next morning, just a few flakes against the window-pane, as they sat in the dining-carat breakfast, but the landscape grew whiter as they whirled on toward home.
"Just as it ought to be for Christmas," declared Allison. "Oh, The Beeches will look so lovely in the snow, and the big log fire will seem so good, I can hardly wait to get there!"
"I know just how it's all going to be," exclaimed Kitty, wriggling impatiently in her seat. "It will be this way, Gay. They'll all be down at the station to meet us, mother and little Elise and Uncle Harry and his dog. Aunt Allison will probably be there, too, and grandmother, if she feels well enough. And old black fat Butler will be standing by the baggage-room door with his wheelbarrow, waiting to take our trunks. And we'll all talk at once. Everybody along the road will be calling 'Howdy!' to us, and at the post-office Miss Mattie will come out to shake hands with us, and tell us how glad she is to see us back. Then it'll be just a step, past the church and the manse and the Bakewell cottage, and we'll turn in at The Beeches,and the fun will begin."
Betty turned to Gay. "That doesn't sound very exciting or especially interesting to a stranger, but, oh, Gay, the Valley is sodearwhen you once get to know it. And when you go back, you feel almostas if everybody were related to you, they're all so friendly and cordial and glad to welcome you home."
Even to impatient schoolgirls homeward bound, the journey's end comes at last, so by nightfall it all happened just as Kitty had predicted. Such a royal welcome awaited Gay that she felt drawn into the midst of things from the moment she stepped from the car.
"You're right, Betty," she whispered as she left her. "Itisa dear Valley, and I feel already as if I belong here."
The two groups separated when the checks had been sorted out and the baggage disposed of. Then, still laughing and talking, Kitty led one on its merry way toward The Beeches, and the other whirled rapidly away in the carriage toward the lights of Locust.
"Whata good gray day this is!" exclaimed Betty next morning, turning from the window to look around the cheerful breakfast-room, all aglow with an open wood-fire. "It's so bleak outside that there is no temptation to go gadding, and so cosy indoors that we'll be glad of the chance to stay at home and finish tying up our Christmas packages."
"Yes," assented Lloyd, who, having finished her breakfast, was standing on the hearth-rug, her back to the fire and her hands clasped behind her. "And for once I intend to have mine all ready the day befoah, so I need not be rushed up to the last minute. For that reason I am glad that mothah had to take the early train to town this mawning, to finish her shopping. If she'd been at home, I should have talked all the time, without accomplishing a thing."
"I think your tissue-paper and ribbon was put into my trunk," said Betty, drumming idly on the window-pane. "I'll go and unpack it in a minute, and have it off my mind, as soon as I see who this is coming up the avenue."
A tall young fellow had turned in at the gate, and was striding along toward the house as if in a great hurry.
"It's Rob Moore!" she exclaimed, in surprise. "I thought he wasn't coming home until Christmas eve."
"So did I," answered Lloyd, crossing the room to look over Betty's shoulder. "I'll beat you to the front doah, Betty."
There was a wild dash through the hall. Both slim figures bounced against the door at the same instant. There was a laughing scuffle over the latch, and then the two girls stood arm in arm between the white pillars of the porch, gaily calling a greeting.
Rob waved a pair of skates in reply, and quickened his stride until he came within speaking distance. One would have thought from his greeting that they had seen each other only the day before. Rob never wasted time on formalities.
"Hurry up, girls! Get your skates. The iceis fine on the creek, and there's a crowd waiting for us down at the depot."
"Who?" demanded Lloyd.
"Oh, the MacIntyre boys and the Walton girls and that little red-headed thing that they brought home from school with them. Kitty's going to have a picnic on the creek bank for her."
"A picnic in Decembah!" ejaculated Lloyd.
"That's what she said," Rob answered, clicking his skates together as he followed the girls into the house. "They telephoned over to me to hustle up here and get you girls. They're on their way to the station now. We're to meet them in the waiting-room."
"They should have let us know soonah," began Lloyd, "so that we could have had a lunch ready. There'll be nothing cooked to take this time of day."
"They didn't know it themselves," he interrupted. "Kitty proposed it at the breakfast-table, and they just grabbed up whatever they could get their hands on and started off."
"We have so much to do to-day," said Betty. "I don't see how we can ever get through if we stop for this."
"Let everything slide!" begged Rob. "Do your work to-morrow. This will be lots of fun. Theice may not last more than a day or so, and the MacIntyre boys are not going to be out here all vacation."
"I suppose we could tie up those packages to-night," said Lloyd, with an inquiring look at Betty.
"Of course," Rob answered for her. "And I'll help you with anything you have to do. Come on."
"Well, then, you run out to the kitchen and ask Aunt Cindy to give you something for a lunch,—anything in sight, and we'll get ready while Mom Beck finds our skates."
Rob rubbed his ears apprehensively. "I'd as soon beard the lion in his den as Aunt Cindy in her kitchen. She's never forgiven my early thefts."
"Go on, goosey," laughed Lloyd. "Don't you know that since you're 'growed up,' as Aunt Cindy says, she swears by you? I heard her tell Mom Beck last night she reckoned she'd have to make a batch of little sugah hah't cakes right away, for Mistah Rob would be coming prowling round her cooky jah."
"Am I growed up?" asked Rob gravely, throwing back his shoulders and looking into the mirror at the tall reflection it showed him.
"You are in inches and ells," laughed Lloyd, "but you're not always six feet tall in yoah actions."
"It's only when I am in your society that I appear so juvenile," retorted Rob. "When I'm away at school with the other fellows, I feel and act as old as Daddy, but when I'm back home, where you all seem to expect me to be a kid, I naturally adjust myself to that role just to be companionable and obliging. You would be afraid of me if I were to turn out my whiskers and stand back on my dignity. You know you would."
"Don't try it, Bobby," advised Lloyd. "It wouldn't be becoming. Trot out to Aunt Cindy and get the lunch. That's a good little man. We'll be ready in just a few minutes."
Even in her baby days, Lloyd had been patronizing at times to her good-natured playmate, ordering him about with a princess-like right that always seemed part of the game. So now he laughingly shrugged his shoulders and started to the kitchen, while Lloyd followed Betty up-stairs to change her slippers for heavy-soled walking-boots.
A few minutes later the three were hurrying down the avenue to the gate, under the bare windswept branches of the locusts.
"Aunt Cindy had disappeared temporarily," said Rob. "There wasn't a soul in the kitchen, so I rummaged around till I found this old basket, andfilled it with a little of everything in sight. It is a long way to the creek. We'll be ready to eat nails by the time we tramp over there in this snappy weather."
"It is snappy," agreed Lloyd. "Betty, yoah cheeks are as red as fiah."
The rosy face under the brown tam-o'-shanter smiled back at her. "So are yours. Aren't they, Rob? They are as red as her coat."
"Hello!" exclaimed Rob, noticing for the first time the long red coat that Lloyd wore. "That's something new, isn't it? I thought you looked different, but I couldn't tell exactly what it was. That's a stunner, sure enough, Princess. It sort of livens up the landscape."
"I'm glad you like it," laughed Lloyd, "but I don't believe you would have seen it at all if Betty hadn't called yoah attention to it. You'll nevah get on in society, Bobby, if you don't learn to notice things. You'll miss all the chances most boys take advantage of to pay compliments and make pretty little speeches."
Rob scowled. "You know I don't go in for that sort of stuff."
"But you ought to," persisted Lloyd, who was in a perverse mood. "I considah it my duty to takeyou in hand and teach you. You may practise on Betty and me. Now we've been talking to Gay all term about our friends in Lloydsboro Valley, and naturally we want everybody to put their best foot foremost and show off their prettiest. Malcolm and Keith will leave a charming impression of themselves, because they will make her feel in such an easy graceful way that she has made that sawt of an impression on them. If she wears an especially pretty dress, or says an especially bright thing, or plays unusually well, they will notice it in some way so that she will know that they noticed it, and that they were pleased. Naturally that will please her, and she will like them bettah for it."
Rob faced her with a whimsical expression. "Look here, Lloyd Sherman, I've played every kind of a game that you've asked me to ever since I learned to walk. I've been your man Friday when you wanted to be Robinson Crusoe, and played B'r Fox to your B'r Rabbit. You've scalped me and buried me and dug me up. You've made me be Pharaoh with the ten plagues of Egypt, or a Christian martyr thrown to the wild beasts, just as it pleased your fancy. I've even played dolls with you week at a time, but I swear I draw the line at this. I'll do anything in reason to help entertainyour chum,—ride or dance or skate or get up private theatricals,—but I'llnotmake a ninny of myself trying to be flowery and get off complimentary speeches. It comes natural to some people, but I'm not built that way. I'd be as awkward at it as a fish out of water."
Lloyd turned her head with a despairing gesture. "Oh, Rob, you're hopeless! You don't undahstand at all! Nobody wants you to be flowery, and nobody likes flat-footed, out-and-out compliments. They're not nice at all. I just meant—well—I scarcely know what Ididmean, but you know how Malcolm does. It isn't that he says a thing in so many words, but he has a way of somehow making you feel that he has noticed nice things about you, and that he isthinkingcompliments."
"Gee whiz!" exclaimed Rob, in a teasing tone. "Say that again, won't you please, and say it slowly, so that I can take it all in. Do I get the thought? To be agreeable one must not say things, but must cultivate an air of having noticed that you are agreeable, and stand off and think compliments so hard that you can actually feel them flying through the air. Is that your idea?"
"Oh, Rob! Stop your teasing."
"Well, that is what you said, or words to that effect. Didn't she, Betty?"
The brown eyes flashed an amused smile at him. They walked along in silence for a few minutes, then he said, humbly, but with a twinkle in his eye which boded mischief: "Well, I'll do the best I can to please you, Lloyd. I'll watch Malcolm till I get the hang of it, then I'll stand off and think compliments about your friend till her ears burn and she is duly impressed. Grandfather is always saying, 'Who does the best his circumstance allows, does nobly. Angels could do no more.'"
"I wish I had never mentioned the subject," pouted Lloyd, as they walked on down the frozen pike. "I simply meant to give you a little advice for yoah own good, and you've gone and made a joke of it. I am suah you'll say or do something befoah the mawning is ovah that will make Gay think you are perfectly dreadful."
Rob only laughed in answer, leaving her to infer that she had good reason for her fears. As they passed the only store which the Valley boasted, Kitty came rushing out, a bright new tin saucepan dangling at her side like a drum. It was tied by a piece of twine, and she was beating a tattoo uponit with a long-handled iron spoon. Keith followed, his overcoat pockets bulging with parcels.
"Are you playing Santa Claus this early?" cried Betty, as he hurried across to shake hands with them.
"No; Kitty decided that no social function in the woods was properly a picnic without a fire and some kind of a mess to cook. So we stopped at the store, and she's loaded me down with stuff for fudge. Malcolm and the girls are on ahead in the waiting-room."
"Where's Ranald?" asked Lloyd, as they crossed the railroad track and walked along the platform toward the door of the station.
"He's gone hunting with John Baylor, the boy he brought home from school with him," answered Kitty. "We can't get him within a stone's throw of Gay. I teased him so unmercifully in my letters about the girl who had asked for his picture to put in her group of heroes that he won't even look in her direction."
As Lloyd greeted Malcolm, whom she had not seen since the close of the summer vacation, and then stood talking with him while Allison introduced Rob to her guest, she was conscious that Rob was watching every motion, and making noteof it, to tease her afterward. A few moments later, when they were all discussing a choice of places for the picnic-grounds, he edged over to her.
"Now I understand what you mean," he said, in a low voice. "Malcolm didn't say anything about that red coat. He just gave a sort of quick, pleased glance at it, as if it had hit him hard, and made some gallant speech about a Kentucky cardinal. I tried my best to follow suit. So when I was introduced, I gave the same kind of a glad start when I saw her hair, and was about to make a similar reference to a Texas redbird, when my courage failed me. So I just stood off and fired the name at her in thought till I'm sure she understood."
"You mean thing!" exclaimed Lloyd, under her breath. "Her hair isn't red. It's just a deep, rich, bronzy auburn, and perfectly lovely. I do wish I'd nevah said anything. Now you'll not act natural, and you won't like each othah as I had hoped you would."
A gayer picnic party never started down the pike than the one that went laughing along the road that winter morning, under barbed-wire fences, through pasture gates, across bare woodlands, and over frozen corn-fields. It was a still gray morning,with the chill of snow in the air, and presently the snow began to fall in big feathery flakes.
Gay was delighted. She held up her face to let the cold, star-shaped crystals settle on it. She caught them on her sleeve to marvel over their airy beauty. "It's like frozen thistle-down!" she cried. "I hope it will snow all day and all night until everything is covered. I never saw a white Christmas."
"This will stop the skating," said Allison, "unless we had a broom to sweep the ice as it falls."
Rob offered to go back for one, but they were so far on their way they all protested it would not be worth while.
"How much farthah is it?" asked Lloyd, presently. For the last half-mile she had had nothing to say, and had fallen behind the others.
"I'm so tiahed I can hardly take another step."
Rob looked at her curiously. It seemed strange for Lloyd to admit that she was tired. He had known her to tramp nearly all day after nuts, and then be ready for a horseback ride afterward.
"We'll stop just over this hill," he replied. "There's a good place to camp. Here! Catch hold of my skate-strap, and I'll help pull you up."
"It helps some," she said, clinging to the strapswung over his shoulder, "but I don't believe I'll evah get ovah this hill."
"It looks like a grove of Christmas trees!" cried Gay, as they started down the other side toward the creek. Little cedars from two to five feet high dotted the hillside, and the snow had drifted across them till the branches drooped with the soft white burden. It began blowing faster, and coming down like a thick white sheet between them and the creek.
Rob, who had often picnicked here on his hunting trips, led the way farther down the hill to a cavelike opening under an overhanging ledge of rocks.
"This will keep the wind off your backs," he said. "Huddle down here a few minutes until we build a fire. Then you'll be all right."
Some charred sticks and ashes between two flat rocks, with an old piece of sheet iron laid on top, marked the spot where many meals had been cooked. The boys began at once foraging for firewood. There was plenty of it all around,—dead limbs and broken twigs,—and soon they had a big heap ready to light.
"Now if somebody can donate a piece of paper to start a blaze, we'll have you warm in a jiffy," said Rob.
Keith slapped his pockets. "I haven't a scrap," he declared. "Malcolm, you might be able to spare that bunch of letters you carry around in your pocket. You've read them enough to know them by heart, I should think."
"Oh, keep still, can't you?" muttered Malcolm, in an aside. "Don't get funny now."
"See him get red!" whispered Keith to Betty. "They're from a girl he met at the first college hop last fall. She's older than he is, but he thinks she's the one and only."
Then he turned to Malcolm again. "You might at least spare the envelopes when it's to keep us from freezing. It would be a big sacrifice, but to save your own blood and kin, you know—"
Malcolm stole a quick glance at Lloyd, but she was leaning wearily against the ledge of rocks, paying no attention to Keith's remarks. Kitty solved the difficulty by diving into Keith's pockets after the packages, and emptying the brown sugar and chocolate into the saucepan. She handed the wrapping-paper and bag to Rob, saying if that was not enough she would scratch the label off the can of evaporated cream.
Carefully holding his hat over the pile of twigs to shield it from the wind, Rob applied a match tothe paper. It blazed up and caught the wood at once, and in a few moments a comfortable fire was crackling in front of them. Back in the cavelike hollow, under the rocks, the boys found a big, dry log, which other campers had put there for a seat. They rolled it forward toward the fire. Some flat stones were soon heated for the girls to put their feet on, and, warmed and rested, they began to investigate the contents of the baskets.
"Oh, Rob!" groaned Lloyd. "What a lunch you did pick up for a wintah day! These slabs of cold pumpkin pie would freeze the teeth of a polah beah, and there's nothing else but pickles and cheese and apples and raw eggs."
"That's fine!" exclaimed Allison. "We can roast the eggs in the ashes, and I've brought bacon to broil over the fire on switches. And here's crackers and gingersnaps and salmon—"
"And peanuts," added Kitty, "don't forget them. Or the fudge. We will have that ready in a little while."
"Now what could be jollier than this?" cried Gay, as she took the long, pointed switch that Rob cut for her, and held a piece of bacon over the fire to broil. "It's a thousand times nicer than a picnic in the summer, when you get so hot, and the mosquitoesand redbugs and spiders swarm all over you."
Lloyd, with a sigh of relief, saw that Rob was "acting natural" at last, and he and Gay were showing off to mutual advantage. She was enjoying the novel experience so fully that she was in her brightest spirits, and he was talking to her with the familiar ease with which he talked to Lloyd and Betty, even scolding her with brotherly frankness when she dripped bacon grease around too promiscuously.
The eggs were saltless, the bacon smoked and black, because, held in the flame as often as against the embers, nearly every piece caught fire and had to be blown out. Smoke blew in their eyes, and the snow fell thicker and thicker. But, with their feet on the hot stones, their backs to the sheltering ledge of rocks, and the fire crackling in front of them, they sang and laughed and ate with a zest which no summer picnic could have inspired.
No one had remembered to bring a pail for water, and rather than tramp over another hill to a distant spring, they quenched their thirst with handfuls of snow. The fudge boiled over, and more than half of it was lost in the ashes.
"It's a good thing that it did," Allison declared,tossing the empty salmon box and a bag of peanut shells into the fire. "Ugh! The mixture we've already eaten is enough to kill us! I think we ought to start back home now. I'm sure that I heard the one o'clock train whistle."
But Kitty protested. They hadn't been out half long enough, she said. If the ice on the creek had been free from snow, they would have skated for hours, and she thought as long as that sport had been spoiled, they ought to do something to make up for it. Gay had never gathered any mistletoe. She thought it would be fun for them all to go around by Stone Hollow, and get some off the big trees that grew in the surrounding pastures.
Lloyd listened to the ready assent of the others with a sinking heart. She had been leaning back against the rocks for some time, taking no part in the conversation. She had grown so tired that she dreaded the long tramp home, and had been vainly wishing that Tarbaby could suddenly appear on the scene, or some one with a conveyance. Even a wheelbarrow or a go-cart would have been welcome. She could not remember that she had ever felt so exhausted before in all her life.
"But I won't be the one to hang back and spoil every one's fun," she said to herself, "Theywouldn't let me go home the shorter way by myself. It would only break up the pah'ty if I proposed it. But I do not see how I can evah drag myself all the way around by Stone Hollow."
At another time they might have noticed that she lagged behind, that she had little to say, and that she looked white and tired. But Gay, her spirits rising in the wintry air, was in her most rollicking mood. Even Kitty had never known her to say so many funny things or to tell so many amusing experiences. She followed on behind with Lloyd, watching admiringly as Gay's bright face was turned first toward Malcolm, then toward Rob, jubilant to see that her guest was captivating them as she did every one else who fell under the charm of her vivacious manner.
Betty and Allison were on ahead with Keith, keeping a sharp lookout for mistletoe. Lloyd scarcely heard what any one said. She plodded along like one in a dream. It was an effort just to lift her feet. Only one thing in life seemed desirable just then, that was her warm soft bed at home. If she could only creep into that and shut her tired eyes and lie there, she wouldn't care if she didn't waken for a month. She felt that itwould be bliss to sleep through Christmas and the entire vacation.
The long walk came to an end at last. The roundabout route through Stone Hollow led them near Locust, and, with their arms full of mistletoe, the merry picnickers parted from Lloyd and Betty at the gate. Gay exclaimed enthusiastically over the beautiful old avenue, leading under the snow-covered locusts to the house, but to Lloyd's relief her invitation to come in was refused. There were a dozen reasons why they could not stop, but they promised to be over early next morning.
"It has been the very loveliest picnic I ever went to in my whole life," declared Gay, as they turned away. "I'd like to turn around and do it all over again."
"So would I," echoed Betty, warmly. "I'm not at all tired."
Lloyd looked at her in vague wonder as they plodded up the avenue. "I don't know what's the mattah with me," she said, "that I couldn't keep up with you all, unless it's true what Miss Gilmer said. The ice is too thin for holiday dissipations, and this picnic was too great a weight for it."
Betty glanced at her white face anxiously. "Goand lie down the rest of the afternoon," she said. "I'll tie up your packages."
"Oh, if you only would!" exclaimed Lloyd, gratefully. "But it seems too much to ask of any one. Don't tell mothah that I got so woh'n out. I'll be all right by evening."
"She hasn't come home yet," said Betty, looking ahead of them at the smooth expanse of newly fallen snow. "There isn't a track either of foot or wheel."
"Then maybe I'll have time for a nap, and be all rested when she comes," said Lloyd. "I don't want her to get any of Miss Gilmer's notions about me."