The Leader of the Lower School A Tale of School Life

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Gipsy Arrives

Onedank, wet, clammy afternoon at the beginning of October half a dozen of the boarders at Briarcroft Hall stood at the Juniors' sitting-room window, watching the umbrellas of the day girls disappear through the side gate. It had been drizzling since dinner-time, and the prospect outside was not a remarkably exhilarating one. The yellow leaves of the oak tree dripped slow tears on to the flagged walk, as if weeping beforehand for their own speedy demise; the little classical statue on the fountain looked a decidedly watery goddess, the sodden flowers had trailed their heads in the soil, and a small rivulet was running down the steps of the summer house. As the last two umbrellas, after a brief and exciting struggle for precedence, passed through the portal and thegate was shut with a slam, Lennie Chapman turned to her companions and heaved a tragic sigh.

"Isn't it withering?" she remarked. "And just on the very afternoon when we'd made up our minds to decide the tennis championship, and secured all the courts for the Lower School. I do call it the most wretched luck! I'm a blighted blossom!"

"We'll never persuade the Seniors to give us all the courts again!" wailed Fiona Campbell. "They said so emphatically that it was only to be for this once."

"I believe they knew it was going to be wet!" growled Dilys Fenton.

"You don't think if it cleared a little we might manage just a set before tea?" suggested Norah Bell half hopefully.

"My good girl, please to look at the lawn! Do you think anyone in her senses would try to play on a swamp like that?"

"It's getting too late in the year for tennis," yawned Hetty Hancock. "Don't believe we shall get another game at all. We'd better resign ourselves."

"Resign ourselves to what?" asked Daisy Scatcherd.

"Why, to leaving the championship till next summer, and to not going out to-day, and to sitting stuffing here and moaning our bad luck, and feeling as cross as a bear with a toothache—at least, that's how I feel: I don't know what the rest of you do!"

"I should like to have gone home with the day girls," sighed Dilys Fenton.

"No, you wouldn't!" snapped Norah Bell. "You know it's jollier to be a boarder; we do have some jolly times, even if it does rain. You can't expect it always to keep fine, and as for——"

"Oh, Norah, don't preach! We must have our growls—it lets off steam. I think it's the wretchedest, miserablest, detestablest, most altogether sickening afternoon that ever was—there!"

"If only something would happen, just to cheer us up a little!" said Lennie Chapman, opening the window rather wider and putting her head out into the rain.

"What do you want to happen?"

"Why, something exciting, of course—something interesting and jolly, and out of the common, to wake us up and make things more lively."

"You'll fall out of the window if you lean over like that, and that would be lively, in all conscience, if you were picked up in fragments. Come in; you're getting your hair wet."

"Let me alone!...