If indeed the gentle, grey-robed nuns who long, long ago had stolen silently along those very same stairs could have come back to survey the scene of their former activities, I fear on this particular occasion they would have wrung their slim, transparent hands in horror over the stalwart modern maidens who had succeeded them in possession of the ancient, rambling house. No pale-faced novices these, with downcast eyes and cheeks sunken with fasting; no timid glances, no soft ethereal footfalls or gliding garments—the old order had changed indeed, and yielded place to a rosy, racy, healthy, hearty, well-grown set of twentieth-century schoolgirls, overflowing with vigorous young life and abounding spirits, mentally and physically fit, and about as different[11] from their mediaeval forerunners as a hockey stick is from a spindle.

[11]

Among the jolly, careless company that on this January evening held carnival in the vaulted passages, and woke the echoes of the time-hallowed walls, no two had abandoned themselves to the fun of the moment more thoroughly than Deirdre Sullivan and Dulcie Wilcox. They had attempted to dance five varieties of fancy steps on an upper landing, had performed a species of Highland fling down the stairs, and had finished with an irregular jog-trot along the lower corridor, subsiding finally, scarlet with their exertions, and wellnigh voiceless, on to the bottom step of the back staircase.

"Oh!—let's—sit here—and talk," heaved Deirdre, her power of speech returning in jerks. "I'm—tired—of ragging round—and—I've not seen you—for ages!—and oh!—there's such heaps and heaps—to tell. Look!—she's over there!"

"Who?" queried Dulcie laconically. She was stouter than Deirdre, and, like Hamlet, "scant of breath".

"Why, she, of course!"

"Don't be a lunatic! Which she? And what she? And why she of all shes?" gasped Dulcie, still rather convulsively and painfully.

"What 'she' could I possibly mean except the new girl?"

"You don't mean to tell me there's a new girl?"

"You don't surely mean to tell me you've never noticed her! You blind bat! Why, there she is as large as life! Can't you see her, stupid? The atrocious[12] part of it is, she's been stuck into our bedroom!"

[12]

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