  “ ‘It’s all right,’ Jean assured him. ‘No one knows you are here.’ ” THE TWINS OF EMU PLAINS
BY MARY GRANT BRUCE
ILLUSTRATED
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED LONDON AND MELBOURNE Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London CONTENTS
THE final struggle in the tennis match between Merriwa and Kooringal schools was raging, and the very air about the court at Merriwa was vibrant with excitement. The western side, which gave the best view, without the sun in one’s eyes, was, by traditional use, given over to the supporters of the visiting team; and there the Kooringals massed in a solid phalanx, under their green and mauve flag, and screamed as one individual at the doughty strokes of their champions. Opposite them were the long lines of the Merriwiggians, with dark-blue favours that matched their silken banner, and with voices no less jubilant when a well-placed School stroke got past the said champions’ defence. At either end of the court the seats of the mighty bore the impressive forms of “teachers, parents, and guardians”; some watching the play as eagerly as any Fourth Form youngster, while others were so lost to a sense of their opportunities as to while away the time in discussing the latest Russian pianist or the result of the State Elections. Afternoon tea had already occurred; even now, in the pavilion, could be heard the clatter of crockery as the maids packed up—a faint and far-away sound, that contrasted oddly with the simmering excitement round the tennis-court. The game had been very level, but, on the whole, Kooringal felt its star in the ascendant. So far, indeed, the match was a tie, but there was good cause for the visitors’ comfortable feeling of security, for the Merriwa pair for the finals were not seriously considered as champions. Their place in the team was due only to the fact that Merriwa was short of tennis players. Now they had to meet the Kooringal cracks, a year older, and winners on many a hard-foughten field. It was small wonder if the Merriwiggians settled themselves to watch the finals with hearts inclined to sink. They felt rather worse at the end of the first sett, and through their ranks ran a feeling of “I-told-you-so!” Jean and Josephine Weston, their players, had shown from the first that they were oppressed by the magnitude of their task. They played carefully, without any dash, afraid to take any liberties with the tall pair across the net, who seemed so huge and so confident. By luck, rather than by play, they had managed to win four games to six: that it was luck no one knew more clearly than Jean and Jo. They exchanged depressed looks when “Game and sett!” was called at the end. It had been a “love” game, thanks to the appalling series of balls Eva Severne had served: unplayable, malevolent streaks of grey light, which had merely touched the ground in the extreme corners of their courts before disappearing into the landscape. Jean and Jo had “swiped” at them unavailingly; useful exercise, but in no way affecting the balls. “We’re not going to be even amusement to them!” Jean remarked, as they crossed over to change ends. “Isn’t it perfectly awful, Jo! And I never tried so hard in my life!” “Neither did I,” Jo answered. “And, of course, the more I try, the worse I play. Look here, Jean, it isn’t a bit of use trying—to play a careful game, I mean. This isn’t a time to be careful. I’m going to be desperate!” “Oh, are you?” Jean met her twin’s eyes with an answering flash. “Well, I suppose the only thing is to be desperate too. We’ll just slog.” “Right! And there’s another thing—Mona Burton isn’t playing nearly as well as that terrible Severne girl. She’s muffed a good few balls.” “That’s why the sett was 6-4!” said Jean drily. “Well, we’ll give her all we can. Your serve, Jo—slog them in!” Jo slogged accordingly, and had the satisfaction of seeing her first ball hit the top of the net. In ordinary moments this would have induced a careful second service, and Eva Severne moved up closer to the net in anticipation. Instead, Jo set her teeth and sent the second ball with even more fervour than the first. It went true, and Eva was never even near it. The twins grinned at each other as they crossed. “Go on being desperate!” Jean said. “It pays!” Which may or may not have been why within two minutes the Merriwiggians were tumultuously applauding a “love” game as emphatic as that which only a few moments earlier had been delightedly acclaimed by the ranks of Kooringal! The sett ran to a swift and exciting conclusion. The twins’ play was occasionally erratic, but never for a moment dull: they had decided upon ways of desperation, and they fled wildly from one place to another, hitting at everything, possible or impossible; occasionally achieving what seemed to be impossible, by reason of amazing agility. They were a lithe and active pair, built on economical lines that suggested that wire and whipcord were largely used in their composition. Certainly, both whipcord and wire were in evidence in their strokes. There was no special science in their method, but it was good, hard-hitting play; and as they always played together, they knew exactly what to expect of each other, and never overlapped. The Kooringal pair were taken aback. The first sett had made them feel confident of an easy victory. Mona Burton knew that she was not playing well, but then Eva seemed to be on her usual superb pinnacle of self-confidence, and would be sure to pull them through. She had not worried, even when she had “muffed” a few strokes. But in the second sett the small pair of Merriwiggians seemed to be transformed into a couple of inspired imps, who bounded and twisted and ran—how they ran, thought Mona, who was inclined to plumpness, and preferred a game conducted mainly from the back line! Nothing came amiss to them, and they served balls that seemed to Mona to be compounded of quicksilver and electricity. Even the redoubtable Eva was nonplussed; the opening games had not prepared her for anything like this. Her own play showed distinct signs of being “rattled”: she missed strokes that would ordinarily have been easy to her, and her service lost a good deal of its “bite.” Silence—dismayed silence—fell upon the ranks of Kooringal, while among the Merriwiggians rapture and amazement mounted until the sett came to a triumphant conclusion at 6-3! “Can you make it last?” Helen Forester, the Merriwa captain, managed to whisper to Jean, as the twins changed ends with their opponents. Jean gave a rapturous gurgle. “I don’t know,” she answered. “We’re both quite mad, of course. It would be an awful lark, if only it weren’t so terrible!” She caught her twin’s eye and they grinned at each other. In Jo’s glance there was something of a look familiar to Jean: she had seen it often when they were mustering young cattle with their father, and an excited bullock had needed determination and hard riding to bring him round to the main mob. The twins loved such jobs, and Jo used to gallop after a fugitive with her jaw set in a firm line, but her eyes alight with laughter. So she looked now: the immaculate, white-clad girls in the other court might have been a pair of unruly steers, bent on breaking away, and the racquet she swung loosely, a stock-whip ready for use, as she waited for Eva’s service. The familiar look gave Jean fresh courage. Terrible the game might be, but it was certainly also a lark! Possibly, had they been girls bred to games, with years of school-life behind them, and the importance of tennis tournaments ground into their beings by tradition and experience, the twins might have been unable to tackle that last sett with the cheery courage that somehow communicated itself to the tense onlookers. They would have been crushed by the importance of their task; and in that case they would most certainly have gone under. But Jean and Jo Weston had had only a year of a Melbourne school, and behind that lay a lifetime of the lonely country, where games were mere incidents, and where recreation meant, for the most part, sharing their father’s work on the station. Even after a year of school, tennis—even tournament tennis—was only a game to the twins. They had taken to it with quick natural aptitude, and being unusually tough and wiry, with eye and hand trained by the use of stock-whip and rifle, they had soon found themselves in the front rank, with the consequent responsibility of match play. That, if they could but adopt the view-point of their school-mates, was rather terrible. Jean and Jo obediently echoed them, and said it was terrible. But at the back of their minds was the conviction that it was only a game after all. They had played the first sett with a due sense of responsibility. In the second, they had cast responsibility to the winds, and had been merely desperate. It had paid, and there was no question as to which method was the more enjoyable. Therefore, there seemed to the twins no reason why they should not continue to be cheerfully insane. They did better when they were insane, and it was so very much more pleasant! Eva Severne made a desperate effort to recapture the Kooringal lead in that last sett. There were times when she played so brilliantly that no mere insanity on the part of the twins could enable them to meet her balls. But Mona Burton was manifestly weighed down by the madness of the flitting pair opposite, who never by any chance were where you might expect them to be, and who seemed capable of acrobatic feats worthy of a circus. They never looked worried; in fact, they laughed a great deal, until the spectators caught the infection, and rocked with laughter themselves. It was a delirious game, full of amazing incidents, in which the inferior players scored simply by desperate hitting and by taking chances that no one would, in sober moments, have dreamed of taking. Nine times out of ten, the system—if system it could be called—would have failed. But this happened to be the tenth time. Luck held, and impossibilities happened. Finally, a smashing half-volley from Eva, on its way to annihilate Jo, was intercepted by Jean, who executed a leap into mid-air only comparable to the jump of a performing flea! The ball seemed to wobble in the air for a moment, and then dropped weakly on the far side of the net. Eva and Mona, rushing madly to reach it, collided violently; the spent ball dropped: and, amid a gale of laughter from all round the court, and a crescendo of delirium from the ranks of Merriwa, the sett ended in victory for the twins at 6-3! Jean and Jo, laughing and half-apologetic, shook hands with their opponents. “Of course, it’s the most amazing luck!” Jean said. “You’re simply miles beyond us, really: we haven’t a scrap of science.” “I don’t believe you have,” said Eva, regarding them with an amazed air. “But I hope we’ll meet some one scientific next time, that’s all! You’re so hopelessly unexpected!” “The win was unexpected, at any rate,” Jo laughed. “We looked on ourselves as utterly beaten at the end of the first sett, so we just went Berserk. It was great fun!” “Fun—to you!” Mona Burton was still panting. “I feel as if I should never get my breath again. Never—never—never did I play at such a rate! Do you ever get tired, you two wild things?” “Oh, not often,” Jo answered. “And it was far too exciting to think of getting tired.” Then suddenly they were swamped in a wild surge of school-fellows, their hands pumped, their backs patted. Delighted juniors bore their blazers, holding them proudly while they donned them, and uttering incoherent murmurs of joy. Amidst the general delirium two majestic figures detached themselves from the throng at the far end of the court. The crowd melted like magic at their approach, and presently Jean and Jo, blushing like poppies, found themselves receiving the dignified congratulations of the two principals. “A most interesting game—and a truly energetic one!” said Miss Atchison, of Kooringal, in the measured tones that made her least remark seem like an anthem. “Miss Dampier tells me you are twins—and not sixteen yet. You should play well when you are a year older.” “Oh, but it was only luck,” the twins assured her. “You wouldn’t really call our play tennis!” “Well, it was too good for us!” said Eva Severne, laughing. Then Miss Atchison and Miss Dampier drifted away into the throng of parents and visitors, who were beginning to think of trams and motors, and the girls closed once more round the twins. Every one discussed points of the play, and most people seemed to concur in the view that the twins were mad. But it was, as Helen Forester said, a pleasant madness. The Kooringal boarders formed up presently, and marched away, still bearing their banner proudly. “Just you wait until next year!” said Eva Severne, shaking a threatening fist merrily at the twins. “Yes, next year!” echoed Mona. “I shall have left then, but I hope we shall have somebody less fat to meet you.” She sighed. “Certainly, no one who plays against you should be fat!” “We may be fat ourselves!” said the twins—a remark greeted with derisive cheers. “At any rate we’ll work up ever so much science.” “Sure you’ll be here next year?” asked a Kooringal girl. “Oh, certain. Two more years of school, at least—perhaps three. So there’s lots of tennis ahead,” Jo uttered, happily. “Next year we must take it up in earnest and learn all the technical part. Then I suppose we’ll find out why your balls go straight through one’s racquet, Eva!” “I wish they had done so a bit more to-day!” said Eva ruefully. “Well, it’s time we took our battered remnant to the tram. Good-bye—and it was a very jolly game, even if you did beat us!” The Merriwiggians escorted them to the gate, and they marched down the road, in excellent formation for “battered remnants.” Then the school closed round the Weston twins, and, lifting them shoulder-high, carried them up the path to the house, asserting loudly and more or less tunefully, that they were jolly good fellows. The sudden appearance at a window of Miss Dampier disorganized the procession, and those responsible for the twins dropped them. Miss Dampier disappeared as quickly as she had come. She was that pearl among women, a headmistress who realized that teachers should occasionally have no official existence. Jean and Jo picked themselves up, remarking that the consequences of winning a match seemed to be more strenuous than the game itself! They turned scared eyes on an attempt to revive the procession, and, ducking under admiring arms, fled to their dormitory. No one was there, and they sat down and looked at each other. In each look there was a sudden access of respect. “Well, I didn’t think you had it in you!” remarked Jean. “I didn’t either,” responded Jo. ‟WAKE up, Nita!” Nita Anderson grunted and buried her dark head yet deeper in the pillow. “The bell hasn’t gone yet,” she murmured. “Do go away and stop playing the goat!” “Well, if I do, you’ll get no supper,” said the caller, not ceasing to be energetic. “Why, no self-respecting person goes to sleep at all before a supper, and here you are, snoring like a hog!” “I don’t snore!” said Nita indignantly. She cast a wrathful glance at her accuser. “Thought that would fetch you!” said that damsel gaily. “But you can’t be certain, and now you’ll never know! Hurry up, or all the Éclairs will be gone before you get there.” She capered off, and Nita, with a huge yawn, jumped out of bed and sought for her kimono. There were about a dozen girls in the room to which she found her way presently. As a rule, midnight suppers were conducted in muffled tones, the only illumination a candle-end, and enjoyment was heightened by the knowledge that at any moment the dread form of a too-inquisitive governess, or even of Miss Dampier herself, might appear. It lent zest to the flavour of even a shop-made sausage-roll when you knew that you might not, as Ellen Webster put it dramatically, “be spared to finish it.” But to-night was different, by time-honoured custom. It was just at the end of term, for one thing: for another, it was match night, and every one knew that on match night Miss Dampier and the staff made a practice of sleeping with such soundness that no untoward noises, such as the popping of ginger-beer or lemonade bottles, or the clatter of strange crockery hastily assembled as goblets, could shake their dreams. Supper arrived almost openly on such nights, in proud hampers from home, or tempting-looking parcels from the big shops in Melbourne: not smuggled in in greasy paper bags, the contents of which were apt to become flattened and crumby long before they were eaten. And, in addition to sleeping soundly, no governess thought of alluding, next morning, to heavy eyes or lessons half-prepared. Miss Dampier always inculcated tact in her staff, especially in the last days of term. There were four beds in the dormitory that Nita entered. One, smoothed over and spread with newspapers, served as supper-table, while on a chest of drawers were ranged the drinks: coffee, that had once been iced, and was now faintly lukewarm—the night was a hot one in December—raspberry vinegar, and a collection of “soft drinks” in bottles. Each girl was supposed to bring her own tooth-glass; but there had been a more surreptitious supper two nights before, at which several of these useful articles had been broken, so that to-night there were deficiencies which had to be filled by such substitutes as the cups of thermos flasks. As may be imagined, a thermos cup is sadly insufficient as a vessel for fizzy drinks; and bitter was the lot of those who depended on them. On her knees upon the floor, Helen Forester was laboriously dissecting a large cold fowl. Her only weapon was a penknife, backed by brute force. “This is a horrible job!” she observed to the company at large, raising a flushed countenance. “I should like to wipe my heated brow, only my hands are too greasy. Nita, you’re great on physiology—do come and tell me where this animal’s joints are.” “Get his side-fixings off,” counselled Nita, coming to her assistance. “You hold one leg and wing firmly, and I’ll hold the others, and we’ll pull. Something’s sure to come apart!” Something did. Nita surveyed the dismembered bird with satisfaction. “There!” she said. “That’s much simpler. Now you just go ahead and dig in here and there till you weaken the general resistance of the creature, and I’ll get the leg-joints apart.” “It sounds simple, but when you come to reality you need an axe!” said Helen. “I suppose if one scrapes the bones until there’s nothing left on them one needn’t bother about getting inside?” “Indeed, there’s the stuffing—or should be,” said Nita, wrestling gallantly with the leg-joint. At which Helen groaned, and fell to work anew with her inadequate weapon. “Father would shudder at the carving, but there’s nothing wrong with the result,” she remarked placidly, sometime later. “After all, every one seems to have got some, and I believe that it really needs a genius to feed twelve people off one fowl!” “Few could do it,” agreed Nita. “No one is sufficiently grateful to us, of course, but——” There was a chorus of dissent. “We loved watching you!” said Grace Farquhar, in her soft drawl. “I haven’t a doubt of it,” Helen laughed. “Well, it’s something to have been able to provide a circus before supper. Will anyone give me a mÉringue? Thanks, Jo. Have one yourself.” “I’ve had all that’s prudent, thanks,” Jo Weston answered. “MÉringues soon go to your head after you’ve been in strict training for tennis. Did you get an Éclair, Nita?” “I did—thanks to you,” Nita laughed. “Nothing but the vision of missing them would have dragged me from my pillow. I know your mother’s Éclairs, you see. When are you going to learn to make them, Jo?” “Mother might teach me in these hols., she said,” responded Jo. “But she’s not very keen on teaching us while we’re at school. She says we’re to learn all the cookery and domestic science stuff we can from Miss Smith, and she’ll see what it amounts to after we leave. Then she’ll round off the corners.” She laughed. “Personally, I think she’ll find us all corners. Mother hasn’t got any degrees and letters after her name, like the worshipful Smithy, but when it comes to running a house practically, I think she’d leave her cold!” “Oh, but who would expect Smithy to be practical?” demanded Grace. “She looks so exquisite, and she wears such fetching uniforms, and she’s terribly impressive; but you always have the feeling at the back of your mind that she’d expire if the gas-stove wouldn’t act!” “Yes—I’d love to see her reduced to the cooking outfit my grandmother had in the bush,” said Helen. “Colonial oven—did any one of you ever see one?” There was a chorus of “No.” “Just a big oven, built in between bricks; you put a fire underneath and another on top. Then you had a couple of bars across the fire, and balanced your saucepans on that. No pretty aluminium saucepans in those days; just big heavy iron pots.” “Gracious!” said the chorus. “You ought to have heard my grandmother’s remarks on restaurant food,” remarked Helen. “She used to expect to hear of Father’s death any minute after she found that he had to get his lunch in Town every day. Say, girls, I’m glad we don’t have to live up to our grandmothers. Mine used to make all the family clothes—by hand, if you please, and you should just have seen the tucks!—and do all the cooking, when they didn’t have maids, and run the house, and doctor her own family and half the district for fifty miles round, and take an odd turn at harvesting, or bush-fire fighting, or cattle-mustering, or——” “Oh, they couldn’t, Helen! It simply wouldn’t happen!” “But it did! They fought blacks too sometimes on their own, when the grandfathers were away; and they doctored injured cattle, and taught their kiddies, and lots of ’em spun their own wool and knitted it. And they kept up their accomplishments—painting, and music: Grannie played the harp like fun, even when she was old. And they hadn’t any labour-saving devices at all. What if any of us found ourselves up against a job like that!” “I’d be sorry for the person who expected me to keep up accomplishments while I made the family clothes by hand!” said Nita firmly. “That would be sufficient accomplishment for me, thank you. Anyhow, I agree we’re not what our grandmothers were. What are you going to do when you leave, Grace?” “Oh, I’m going to the Gallery,” Grace said. “If I can’t paint I can’t do anything. Later on, if I show signs of its being worth while, they’ll let me go to England to study. What about you?” “Tennis, principally, I think,” said Nita, laughing. “I haven’t thought of anything else. Golf too, I suppose. And dances. I’m going to have a good time for a while, anyhow. Don’t ask me to be serious, because it simply can’t occur!” “Hear, hear!” said several pyjama’d figures, with relieved accents. There were others to whom the breaking of the school chain meant only “a good time.” No one wanted to be serious. “Well, I’m going to learn to run the house,” Helen said. “Mother says so, and what she says generally happens. But we’re going to Ceylon for a year first if we can depot Rex.” “Who’s Rex?” “My little brother. He hasn’t been strong, and the doctor doesn’t want him to go to Ceylon. But he is a bit young for school—only nine. Aunt Ada was to have taken charge of him, but now she is going to England herself. However, I suppose we’ll find a home for him somewhere.” “Ceylon for a year—how gorgeous!” said Jean Weston. “Yes; I’m going to learn to plant tea,” laughed Helen. “If we have luck we may go on to India: Father has cousins in Bombay. But there will be a wonder-year, at any rate. What are you going to do, Jean? Of course I know you’re not leaving yet.” “Thank goodness, no!” Jean answered. “We wanted to go to school from the time we were ten, and we didn’t go until we were over fourteen, so it would be too awful to have only a year. We’re to be left to accumulate learning until we’re eighteen, I believe!” “You won’t be fit to know!” said Gladys Armstrong solemnly. “That depends on how much we accumulate. Thank goodness Father isn’t a bit keen on exams for us. We’re to learn French thoroughly, so’s we can talk it if we ever get to France, and we’re to have a good sound education without any frills, and all the domestic science Smithy can pack into us. That’s Father’s idea: Mother stuck out for a few extras. And they both want us to play all the games we can, barring football!” “They sound extremely satisfactory parents,” said Grace, laughing. “You ask Helen—she knows them!” returned Jo defiantly. “Why, they’re darlings: everybody knows that!” said Helen. “Mr. Weston gave us—the twinses and Nita and me—a most gorgeous time when he came to Town to sell his wool. Didn’t he, Nita?” “Rather!” responded that damsel. “I wish he had wool to sell once a month!” “I’m afraid he won’t have much next year,” Jean said. “The drought is pretty bad up our way; Mother’s letters seem a bit worrified.” “I wish Miss Dampier could hear your new English,” said Ellen Webster. “Well, if you say ‘horrified’ why shouldn’t you say ‘worrified,’ I’d like to know?” Jo demanded. The twins always answered for each other. “You might say ‘horrid’ to match ‘worried’ instead,” remarked Nita. “Why not? Some day, when I’m not busy, I think I’ll make a new dictionary. I know heaps of lovely words that no dictionary-maker ever dreams of putting in.” She yawned. “But seriously, Jean, I hope your father isn’t having a bad time. My uncle is up in your part of the country, and he seems to be pretty hard hit by the drought.” “Oh, Father is sure to be feeling it,” Jean said. “But I ’spect it will be like other bad times: they come and go, you know, and everybody jogs along just the same. Father always says one good year makes up for several bad ones. But of course it makes you pretty blue to be living in the middle of the drought, and seeing the sheep and cattle grow poorer and poorer every day. I know what that’s like. So Mother’s letters can’t be very cheery.” “Jean and I were looking forward to new saddles and riding-kit these hols.,” Jo remarked. “Now I suppose they won’t be able to manage them for us. But it never lasts long. Father will preach economy, and look glum when the bills come in, and of course we’ll economize, somehow—but he’d be awfully wild if he found Mother doing without anything she really wanted! And then the rain will come, and everything will be all right again.” “You’re a cheery old optimist,” Gladys said, laughing. “Well, isn’t life cheery? Things always come right again, if you give them time—Mother says so, at any rate. We always have good times, don’t we, Jo?” And Jo grinned at her twin, and said “Rather!” “My father says,” observed Grace, “that you often get just what you’re looking out for—if you make sure you’re going to have a bad time, it comes, and if you make up your mind that everything will be delightful, then that comes too.” She sighed. “I’ve tried to work out that theory when I was going to the dentist—planned in my own mind that I was going to have something between a pantomime and a picnic. It was, too, I think, for the dentist. But not for me!” She sighed again. Every one laughed, with a painful absence of sympathy. “All the same, I believe in your father’s idea, though I think you tried it pretty high,” remarked Helen. “I do think if you believe in your luck it’s more likely to come than if you make up your mind that nothing will go right. It’s the same with people: if you’re quite sure they are decent, well they generally turn out decent.” “That’s what Father says!” cried Jo. “He always believes every one’s all right.” “Then, when you get let down by some one who isn’t all right,” said Grace—“well, you come with a bump!” “That’s true, I suppose. But Father says he hasn’t had many bumps, and on the whole he’d rather have had them than give up believing in people. Anyhow, I believe in every one—except Miss Smith!” “Well, go on believing—but keep your eyes about you next year, as well,” said Helen, laughing. “You two will be seniors next year, and if you’re not awfully careful you’ll be prefects before it’s over. A lot of seniors are leaving, and Miss Dampier will be so hard up for prefects that she may have to promote even graceless children like you!” “Good—gracious!” said the twins, in tones of horror. “It’s true. You can’t expect for ever to blush unseen in the murky obscurity of the Middle School—’specially when you win tennis matches. Miss Dampier has her eagle eye on you.” “But—but——” gasped Jean, “we shan’t be sixteen until next year! And you’re eighteen, Helen.” “Well, I was a prefect when I was sixteen,” said the Captain, drawing her dainty embroidered kimono round her. “So were Nita and Ellen. And you two are higher in the school for your age than I was.” “Yes, but you’ve often told us that, being twins, we’ve only sense enough for one real person divided between us!” said Jo, amidst laughter. “That’s one of the ways in which one hatches sense in the young,” said Helen. “I’ve told you lots of other things, for your souls’ good. Captains have to.” She smiled at them very kindly; they looked such scared children, so ridiculously alike, in their pyjamas, with their hair tumbling about their flushed faces. “Oh, you’ll be terrors to the wicked juniors when you’re prefects, because they’ll never know which of you they’re talking to! Fancy being quite certain you’d dodged one of the Powers That Be, and then seeing her double stalk out before you!” “I see a vision!” remarked Ellen Webster solemnly. “Two years hence, you and Nita and I will re-visit the old school and tread the familiar paths, once desecrated by the pelting feet of graceless twinses. And lo! we will see droves of demure juniors, damsels without guile——” “There ain’t none such!” said Nita. “—and older damsels of staid, not to say cowed, aspect; and at the head, two goddess-like figures— ‘So like they were, men never Saw twins so like before’— bearing badges of office, and walking statelily Even the Fifth, that band without reverence, will tremble at their gaze. Slowly, majestically——” The orator’s voice died away in a pained gurgle. One twin seized her suddenly from the rear, and tilted her backwards, while the other pressed to her face a large, wet sponge. It was almost dry when the ensuing struggle was over, and most of the water it had contained was distributed evenly over Ellen and the twins. “Ugh!” said Ellen, abandoning all oratory. “You little fiends!” She wriggled in her wet pyjamas. “It’s a nice warm night for a bath!” said Nita, weak from laughing. “Yes, but this only feels clammy. You two, prefects! You’ll never be anything but disgraces!” She glared at the twins, capering safely in the distance, soaked and cheerful. Certainly, there was nothing about them that suggested prefectorial dignity. They danced in a manner only possible in those who have no responsibility. “I believe you’re right,” laughed Helen. “Anyhow, it’s a good thing it’s match night, or you’d certainly have had Miss Dampier in here. And you three are far too wet to sit up any longer: come and clear up the wreck. Who’s going to dispose of the chicken-bones?” |
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