With a sweep of her hand, Patty scrambled the cards together and rose. There would be no chance to escape by the door; the Dowager's voice was already audible in the outer office.
"Goo' by!" said Patty, springing to the window. "Gypsies call. We must go."
She scrambled over the sill and dropped eight feet to the ground. Conny followed. They were both able pupils of Miss Jellings.
Mr. Laurence K. Gilroy, open-mouthed, stood staring at the spot where they had been. The next instant, he was bowing courteously to the principals of St. Ursula's, and striving hard to concentrate a dazed mind upon the short-circuit in the West Wing.
Patty and Conny left the car—and a number of interested passengers—at the corner before they reached the school. Circumnavigating 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-cochère; 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 advanced with eyes discreetly bent upon the ground, but Miss Jellings greeted them gaily as she passed. There was an intangible, excited, happy thrill about her manner—something electric, Patty said.
"Hello, you bad little Gypsies!"
It was a peculiarly infelicitous salutation, but she was smilingly unconscious of any slip.
"Gypsies?"
Mr. Gilroy repeated the word, and his benumbed faculties began to work. He stopped and scanned the trio closely. They were clothed in dainty muslin, three as sweet young girls as one would ever meet. But Patty and Conny, even in the failing light, were still noticeably brunette—it takes boiling water to get out coffee stain.
"Oh!"
He drew a deep breath of enlightenment, while many emotions struggled for supremacy in his face. Conny dropped her gaze embarrassedly to the ground; Patty threw back her head and faced him. He and she eyed each other for a silent instant. In that glance, each asked the other not to tell—and each mutely promised.
The breeze brought the chorus of the "Gypsy Trail"; and as they sauntered on, Miss Jellings fell softly to humming the words in tune with the distant singers:
"And the Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood
Ever the wide world over.
Ever the wide world over, lass,
Ever the trail held true
Over the world and under the world
And back at the last to you.
Follow the Romany patteran—"
The words died away in the shadows.
Conny and Patty and Priscilla stood hand in hand and looked after them.
"The school has lost Jelly!" Patty said, "and I'm afraid that we're to blame, Con, dear."
"I'm glad of it!" Conny spoke with feeling. "She's much too nice to spend her whole life telling Irene McCullough to stand up straight and keep her stomach held in."
"Anyway," Patty added, "he has no right to be angry, because—without us—he never would have dared."
They kept on across the meadow till they came to the pasture bars, where they leaned in a row with their heads tipped back, scanning the darkening sky. Miss Jellings's mood was somehow catching; the little contretemps had stirred them strangely. They felt the thrill of the untried future, with Romance waiting around the corner.
"You know," Conny broke silence after a long pause—"I think, after all, maybe it will be sort of interesting."
"What?" asked Priscilla.
She stretched out her arm in a wide gesture that comprised the night.
"Oh, everything!"
Priscilla nodded understandingly, and presently added with an air of challenge:
"I've changed my mind. I don't believe I'll go to college."
"Not go to college!" Patty echoed blankly. "Why not?"
"I think—I'll get married instead."
"Oh!" Patty laughed softly. "I am going to do both!"