e pantry, blocked the dressing-rooms,
and overflowed into the playground and the gymnasium--girls of all sorts
and descriptions, from the ten-year-olds who had just come up (rather
solemn and overawed) from the Preparatory to those elect and superior
damsels of seventeen who were studying for their Matriculation.

By the empty stove in the Juniors' Common Room stood half a dozen
"betwixt-and-betweens", whose average age probably worked out at
fourteen and a quarter, though Mavie Morris was a giantess compared with
little Ruth Harmon. The six heads were bent together in closest
proximity, and the six tongues were particularly active, for after the
long summer holidays there was such a vast amount to talk about that it
seemed almost impossible to discuss all the interesting items of news
with sufficient rapidity.

"The old Coll. looks no end," said Grace Russell. "It's so smart and
spanky now--one hardly knows it! Pictures in the classrooms, flowers on
the chimneypieces, a stained glass window in the lecture hall, busts on
brackets all along the corridor wall, and the studio floor polished!
Every single place has been done up from top to bottom."

"I'd like it better if it didn't smell so abominably of new paint,"
objected Noelle Kennedy. "When I opened the studio door, the varnish
stuck to my fingers. However, the school certainly looks much nicer.
Why, even the book cupboard has been repapered."

"That's because you splashed ink on the wall last term. Don't you
remember how fearfully cross Miss Hardy was about it?"

"Rather! She insisted that I'd done it on purpose, and couldn't and
wouldn't believe it was an accident. Well, thank goodness we've done
with her! I'm glad teachers don't move up with their forms. I'm of the
opposite opinion to Hamlet, and I'd rather face the evils that I don't
know than those I do. Miss Pitman can't possibly be any worse, and she
may chance to be better."

"I say, it's rather a joke our being in the Upper Fourth now, isn't it?"
remarked Ruth Harmon.

"I'm glad we've all gone up together," said Dorothy Greenfield. "There's
only Marjory Poulton left behind, and she won't be missed. We're exactly
the same old set, with the addition of a few new girls."

"Do you realize," said Mavie Morris, "that we're the top class in the
Lower School now, and that one of us will be chosen Warden? There'll be
an election this afternoon."

"Why, so there will! What a frantic excitement! We shall all h