s
took a soulful upward glance. "I cannot enjoy nature with people
laughing and talking about me. I must be alone and commune with it. I
have stood here watching from the window. What a beautiful and yet a
terrible scene it is. I feel uplifted."

"I wish I felt the same way--uplifted to the extent of two flights of
stairs," said Hester. She had not meant to be funny, but the girls
laughed. Josephine turned upon her a hurt, aggrieved look. But just for
a moment, then she smiled and said gently, "Hester, you little
water-sprite! How can you jest when nature is at war?"

Edna Bucher was another student who would not brave the elements. She
stood at the hall window where the stairway makes a turn. She was
dressed in very somber clothes, guiltless of curves or graces. She did
not look with favor upon girls' trudging out in the storm. It had in it
the element of tom-boyism upon which Miss Bucher looked with alarm.

"No, I did not go," she said meekly and apologetically. "I was brought
up to think it wasn't ladylike to go out in all kinds of weather;
ladies don't do it. It is just what you would expect of a man."

The hearers replied not a word. They did not so much as shrug their
shoulders or glance at each other. But each girl resolved at that
minute, if being hearty and hale and fearless were unladylike, from that
moment they would be that very thing.

The weather soon had its effect upon the spirits of the girls. Gayety in
the dormitories and parlors was reduced to the minimum. Pupils stood
silent at windows, gazing out at the steady downpour. Where they did
gather in groups of three or four, there was no laughing or bright talk.
Just a word now and then, and a low reply. At intervals, someone grew
intolerant and expressed herself. "Will this rain never stop?" "I was
hoping it would clear so that we might go into town."

Their hopes were doomed to disappointment. The rain never ceased for one
instant during the night and all day Friday.

At lunch time Friday, the girls ran out on the campus to see what had
become of their markers of the evening before. They were gone. The
water had come over them and moved up in the campus until it touched the
cannae-beds.

"The flowers will be ruined!" cried the girls. As though to prove the
truth of the statement, a tongue of water curled itself softly about the
plants, sucked deep into the roots, and when it went its way, the
cannaes went with it, and only a hollow was left in