her the ivy-covered buildings of the college lay clustered among
the trees; and in the Sunday quiet, with the sunlight shining on the
towers, it looked like some medieval village sleeping in the valley.
Patty gazed down dreamily with half-shut eyes, and imagined that
presently a band of troubadours and ladies would come riding out on
milk-white mules. But the sight of Peters, strolling to the gateway in
his Sunday clothes, spoiled the illusion, and she turned to her book
with a smile. Presently she closed it, however. This was not the time
for reading. One could read in winter and when it rained, and even in
the college library with every one else turning pages; but out here in
the open, with the real things of life happening all about, it was a
waste of opportunity.

Her eyes wandered back to the campus again, and she suddenly grew sober
as the thought swept over her that in a few weeks more it would be hers
no longer. This happy, irresponsible community life, which had come to
be the only natural way of living, was suddenly at an end. She
remembered the first day of being a freshman, when everything but
herself had looked so big, and she had thought desperately, "Four years
of this!" It had seemed like an eternity; and now that it was over it
seemed like a minute. She wanted to clutch the present and hold it fast.
It was a terrible thing--this growing old.

And there were the girls. She would have to say good-by, with no opening
day in the fall--and Priscilla lived in California and Georgie in South
Dakota and Bonnie in Kentucky and she in New England, and they were the
only people in the world she particularly cared to talk to. She would
have to get acquainted with her mother's friends--with chronically
grown-up people, who talked about husbands and children and servants.
And there would be men. She had never had time to know many men; but
some day she would probably be marrying one of them, and then all
_would_ be over; and before she had time to think, she would be an old
lady, telling her grandchildren stories about when she was a girl.

[Illustration: I have just run away from you, Bishop Copeley]

Patty gazed mournfully down on the campus, almost on the verge of tears
over her lost youth, when a step suddenly sounded on the gravel path,
and she looked up with a startled glance to see a churchly figure
rounding the hill. Involuntarily she prepared for flight; but the bishop
had spied her, together with a litt