vigating the wall,
until they were opposite the stables, they approached the house modestly
by the back way. They had the good fortune to encounter no one more
dangerous than the cook (who gave them some gingerbread) and they
ultimately reached their home in Paradise Alley none the worse for the
adventure--and ninety cents to the good.

* * * * *

When the long, light evenings came, St. Ursula's no longer filled in the
interim between dinner and evening study with indoor dancing, but
romped about on the lawn outside. To-night, being Saturday, there was no
evening study to call them in, and everybody was abroad. The school year
was almost over, the long vacation was at hand--the girls were as full
of bubbling spirits as sixty-four young lambs. Games of blindman's-buff,
and pussy-wants-a-corner, and cross-tag were all in progress at once. A
band of singers on the gymnasium steps was drowning out a smaller band
on the porte-cochere; half-a-dozen hoop-rollers were trotting around the
oval, and scattered groups of strollers, meeting in the narrow paths,
were hailing each other with cheerful calls.

Patty and Conny and Priscilla, washed and dressed and chastened, were
wandering arm in arm through the summer twilight, talking--a trifle
soberly--of the long-looked-forward-to future that was now so
oppressively close upon them.

"You know," Patty spoke with a sort of frightened gulp--"in another week
we'll be _grown-up_!"

They stopped and silently looked back toward the gay crowd romping on
the lawn, toward the big brooding house, that through four tempestuous,
hilarious, care-free years had sheltered them so kindly. Grown-upness
seemed a barren state. They longed to stretch out their hands and clutch
the childhood that they had squandered with so little thought.

"Oh, it's horrible!" Conny breathed with sudden fierceness. "_I want to
stay young!_"

In this unsocial mood, they refused an offered game of hare-and-hounds,
and evading the singers on the gymnasium steps--the song was the "Gypsy
Trail"--they sauntered on down the pergola to the lane, sprinkled with
fallen apple blossoms. At the end of the lane, they came suddenly upon
two other solitary strollers, and stopped short with a gasp of
unbelieving wonder.

"It's Jelly!" Conny whispered.

"And Mr. Gilroy," Patty echoed.

"Shall we run?" asked Conny, in a panic.

"No," said Patty, "pretend not to notice him at all."

The three