“She was here just a minute ago. Wait till I find her, girls. We can’t go ahead without Polly.”

Ruth Brooks dropped her bouquet of white roses on the piano stool, and hurried out into the long corridor. It was still crowded with people, although Crullers had played the tenderest, saddest strains of “TrÄumerei,” and “Blumenlied,” to let them know it was time to go home. Ruth paused on the lower staircase a minute to see if Polly’s brown head showed anywhere below. Between the square reception hall, and the library, stood Miss Calvert, her figure tall and imposing in its black silk gown of state, even among so many. If there was one day in the entire year, when she was radiantly happy, and in her favorite element, it was Commencement day, so her girls said.

After the closing exercises, the members of the H. S. Club had managed to slip away unobserved during the reception. Polly had passed the secret word around that a last meeting would be held in the music room before school closed for vacation time. Yet in spite of this Polly herself, founder of the Hungry Six Club, and its president, and chief cook, was now missing.

Months before, when the fall term opened, the H. S. had been formed as a mutually protective association. Out of thirty-four pupils, twenty-eight at Calvert Hall were out-of-town girls. The other six were day scholars, and all lived at Queen’s Ferry, Virginia. Therefore the six had banded together, and stood by one another faithfully, against the united force of the twenty-eight “regulars.”

“What did Polly tell us to wait up here for?” asked Isabel Lee.

“Vacation,” came Sue’s matter-of-fact tone from the curtained window, where she was watching the long procession of carriages and automobiles in front of Calvert Hall. “Polly has an idea, and she wants us to sew buttons on it.”

“Oh, girls, who’s got the chafing-dish? Did any one remember to get it at all?” Edwina, which the girls cut short to Ted, looked dismayed at the others, and nobody responded. It was a serious moment. If the H. S. Club had possessed a coat-of-arms, there would have been a chafing-dish rampant on a field of fire as part of its symbolism. It had been Polly’s Christmas present to the club. She had smuggled it in, all unknown to Miss Calvert or the other girls, and had beguiled Annie May, the colored cook, to hide it. On special occasions it made its appearance at feasts, wonderful feasts, prepared with the help of Annie May, when the Hungry Six foregathered behind locked doors, with the chafing-dish in the place of honor.

“Open the door, just a little way, girls,” Polly would always say, just at the crucial moment, and the tempting fumes of some chafing-dish decoction would float away down the long dormitory corridor, until the noses of the twenty-eight caught it, and there was an instantaneous bombardment.

“Hold it open till the last minute when you see them coming,” Polly would cry, her brown eyes dancing with fun, as she presided in one of Annie May’s huge aprons, and waved a big spoon. “Just let them get a good whiff of it, so the clans will gather, and then we’ll bar the door.”

And the clans always gathered. First from one room, then another, in the upper dormitories, the “regulars” would troop forth, and cluster around the door where the day pupils ate their luncheon. Polly always held that it was wise to wait until twelve-thirty, as by that time the regulars would have finished eating. Sometimes they would catch murmurs from the corridor.

“Smells like crab meat,” some one would whisper, and from the inner shrine Polly would declaim,

“’Tis crab meat, with green peppers.”

Then a deep groan would rise from the “regulars,” and the Hungry Six would smile at each other, for revenge is sweet. They could not forget the midnight feasts which the “regulars” held while they were away.

Yet, at the very last minute, they had forgotten the chafing-dish. Some of the people were already leaving, and the imposing line of carriages outside the stately old Hall was growing thinner.

“Hadn’t one of us better go downstairs to the kitchen, and find Annie May,” suggested Ted, anxiously. “Polly’s probably talking to somebody, and has forgotten all about us. I saw the Admiral lift up his finger at her, and that signal between them always calls Polly to attention. Wasn’t it dear of him to come and talk to us! What was it he said? Oh, I know. Look, girls, like this.” Ted struck a dignified posture in the center of the floor, her chin set deeply in her lace collar, her brows drawn down in imitation of the Admiral’s own bushy ones.

“Girls, I’ve got it!”

In the doorway stood Polly, her curly hair, brown and glossy as a ripe chestnut, tied back in a cluster of long curls that reached to her waist, her brown eyes brimming over with mischief, and in her hand, wrapped carefully in a clean pillow case, was something the girls all recognized by its outlines.

“I thought of it the very last minute,” went on Polly, quickly, “Annie May hid it the last time we used it, you know, and I forgot to ask her where she had put it. And she’s down in the back hall, crying over the girls who are leaving, so of course I couldn’t disturb her. So I hunted around the kitchen, in the wash boiler, and up in her room, then I guessed. You know the linen closet in the back hall. It was in there, way down under some gray blankets on the bottom shelf. Wasn’t she the wise old darling to put it under the gray ones, so it wouldn’t show if it should happen to get a spot on them! And then I heard Honoria calling me.”

“Whatever did you do, Polly?” whispered the girls, tensely.

“I slipped the chafing-dish into a pillow case, left it on the hall settee, and went to see what she wanted. And afterwards, Mrs. Yates sent for me to be introduced to her.”

“The Senator’s wife?” asked Isabel, eagerly.

“Yes’m. She used to be one of Miss Calvert’s girls when she was young, and she wanted specially to meet me for the sake of the Admiral. It’s dreadful, all the things I have to go through for the sake of that boy. She even said I looked like him.”

Polly’s low, rippling laugh was smothered by a judicious toss of a sofa pillow from Sue.

“Be quiet, goosie, or you’ll have everybody rushing up here to see what’s the matter. Put the pillow case over the chafing-dish so it won’t be seen, and tell us what happened. Why did you tell us all to come up here?”

Polly seated herself on the arm of the nearest chair, and pushed back her hair from her forehead with a gesture exactly like the Admiral’s.

“Ladies, and sisters, and dear colleagues,” she began, in imitation of Miss Calvert’s Commencement Day rhetoric.

“Don’t speechify, Polly,” ordered Ruth, cheerfully. “Hurry up. It’s getting late.”

But Polly went serenely on her own way, which was characteristic of her.

“We stand at the parting of the ways, don’t we? The last year at dear, precious old Honoria’s is over for Ruth and Kate. No more will we six use the historic chafing-dish, no more battle with the twenty-eight strangers who have lingered within our gates.” She turned her head, and smiled at Ted and Sue. “Am I on the right thread of discourse, sisters? Does it sound like oratory?”

“Oh, bozzer,” said Sue, helplessly. “Play ball, Polly, please, please, play ball.”

“I’ll be good, and stop,” Polly retorted, laughing. “Listen. All the rest of the girls, excepting us, are going away on vacations. Real ones, I mean. And for the next two months, what are we going to do?”

“Nothing but rest,” Sue said, dismally.

“That’s just it. We’ll stay around home the way we always do, have a few picnics, and a few lawn parties, and all that sort of thing. We shan’t have any real vacation, anything that is different from everything else we do the whole year round, shall we?”

Five heads shook in unison.

“But, Polly, it would take so much money,” began Ruth, picking one of her roses abstractedly to pieces.

“If we went any distance at all,” Kate Julian laid down the book she had been looking over while Polly talked. She met Polly’s eager glance, and smiled. Kate was nearly eighteen, but both Ruth and herself were firm, true friends of Polly’s, and the Admiral said he approved because Polly needed ballast now and then to keep her steady on her course.

“Oh, it’s quite a distance,” exclaimed Polly. “It wouldn’t be any fun to go along the shore here.”

“Anybody’d think to hear you, Polly, that you had a whole island to colonize, and an airship to travel in,” Kate teased. “I think you’re just blowing a lovely bubble.”

Even Polly had to laugh, for at Calvert Hall her rainbow bubbles that would float so beautifully for a whole minute, then turn into air, were a steady source of fun among the girls.

“Well, you may laugh, but I have the island even if I haven’t any airship,” she said.

There was the soft rustle of silk outside, and Miss Calvert stood in the doorway. She was not the typical principal of a school for girls, Honoria Calvert. There were too many “laughing wrinkles,” as Polly called them, around her gray eyes; and the corners of her generous mouth, and the way the girls clustered about her, told more plainly than words, how dear she was to them all.

“The Admiral is asking for you, Polly, my dear,” she said. “Won’t the girls excuse you, now?”

“Tell my commanding officer, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ please, Miss Calvert,” Polly replied, rising at attention.

“Hurry, girls,” cautioned Miss Calvert, with a warning uplift of her finger, as she went back to her guests. Polly hurried.

“Girls,” she whispered, “report for duty Saturday afternoon, at Glenwood, all of you, because if we are going to do this thing, it must be started right away.”

“Oh, Polly,” pleaded Sue, “is it anything where we can have the dear old chafing-dish feasts?”

Polly turned around as she reached the doorway, and swung the pillow-case around her head. Inside it, the chafing dish cover rattled.

“Indeed it is,” she cried. “We’ll need it more than ever. Will you all be sure to come Saturday?”

“Sure,” echoed all of the girls, solemnly. “Polly’s going to hold a launching party all her own.”

Polly laughed, and nodded mysteriously.

“There’ll be something happening besides a big splash if I do,” she said, and hurried out to join the Admiral.