Peggy Parsons a Hampton Freshman Part 11

"Well," Myra accepted the challenge, "that poem of yours in the _Monthly_--"

"How did you know?" cried Peggy and Katherine, simultaneously.

"Why, I read the foolish thing in the _Monthly_," snapped Myra, surprised.

Peggy, her eyes alight, and Katherine, dawning credulity in her face, turned and met each other's gaze in slow triumph.

"It's _in_?" asked Peggy breathlessly.

"Of course-how else--?" murmured Myra.

"Girls!" cried Peggy, radiantly, "my poem is in the _Monthly_! I didn't suppose they'd really use it-oh, I would have told you all, if I'd been sure. Are the new _Monthlies_ down on the table now, Myra?"

"Yes, they're downstairs."

"I'm going to sneak down just as I am and get mine," breathed Peggy, "and then shall I read it to you, girls?"

Faults, depression, lost faith-all forgotten in the frank joy that was Peggy's.

She pattered across the floor, begged prettily for the key, took it from Hazel Pilcher's reluctant hand, and fitted it in the lock.

A moment later they heard her trailing down the hall.

There was complete silence while she was gone.

The outraged feelings were subsiding, and the girls, who a few moments before were almost hating each other, now waited in pleasant antic.i.p.ation the reading of the poem.

There was no warning of her return. They were simply watching the door, which she had left open, and all of a sudden she stood framed in it, the soft candle glow lighting her lovely face and blue-clad figure, and the tan cover of the _Monthly_ which she held clasped to her heart.

"I-can't come back in," she whispered. "I met our house-mother on the stairs, and she made me promise to go right to my own room if she'd let me creep down and get the _Monthly_ from the table. It's after ten, and all the lights are out down the hall. Good-night, girls; I've had a lovely time," and she really believed she had.

Katherine followed her, with a backward wave of the hand, and what more fault finding went on after their departure they never knew.

"I s'pose it isn't much to any one else," said Peggy deprecatingly, "but I just feel as if this was the nicest number of the _Monthly_ ever gotten out!"

And Katherine answered loyally, "I do too."

The cretonne couch covers they had smoothed up in such haste that morning were carefully folded back, and Katherine climbed into her bed, and with a little tired sigh was fast asleep; but Peggy, after carefully fixing the screen around her room-mate's couch so that the light shouldn't trouble her, propped herself up with pillows in her own bed, the College _Monthly_ on her knees.

She found her name in the index, "Margaret Parsons," and was thrilled by the formality of that. Then she fluttered the leaves over-just as any one might, she told herself, until she came, to her intense surprise, of course, to her poem.

This she proceeded to read. And when she had finished, she tried to read one of the stories or a poem by some one else, but somehow nothing seemed interesting after that-nothing had for her quite the vividness or charm, so she shamefacedly yielded to the temptation to read hers all over again.

But before she had finished, a curious sound disturbed her.

From somewhere down the hall came the unmistakable sobs of a person crying out her heart in heedless abandon. It was not very loud, but was penetrating and alarming.

Peggy listened, hardly able to believe her ears. When she and Katherine were so happy in college, was it possible any girl would have cause to cry like that?-right here in Ambler House?-the nicest dorm on Campus?

Sighing, she slid her feet into her slippers, dipped her arms into her kimono again, laid the precious _Monthly_ on the dressing-table, turned out the light and was soon in the fearsome hall, with those sounds echoing down it, and no light but the tiny globule of red at the other end, which indicated the fire-escape.

She went on toward the unwinking light, until she was sure she stood before the door through which the crying emanated.

It was Lilian Moore's room. She had a small single room and was apparently drowning herself in tears there.

The recklessness of the crying, the absolute indifference as to who heard or knew, made Peggy hesitate for just a minute before she turned the k.n.o.b of the door and went in. She was not exactly afraid, and yet she felt very much alone with something too painful for her to cope with, as she felt her way into the darkness.

She felt her foot sink into a soft pile of clothing, then immediately after, she stumbled against some large and solid object that she never remembered having seen in the middle of Lilian's room, and for which she failed utterly to account.

Lilian was throwing herself about on the bed now, and Peggy did not know whether she realized there was any one in the room or not. She felt for the light, and, after much fumbling, found it, and snapped it on.

The freshman's room was in a state of complete confusion. An open trunk half packed was what she had run against in the darkness. Piles of clothing and books were strewn round about it on the floor, ready to go in. Lilian, herself, fully dressed, started up from the bed with a cry, as the glare of light flooded everything, and dropped back moaning when she saw that it was Peggy who had come.

"Now," said Peggy quietly, sitting down on the bed beside the tossing figure, "let's be real still or the matron will hear us."

This obvious common sense thrown like cold water over her misery had an immediate effect on the other girl, who had expected sympathy.

The sobs shuddered down to long-drawn painful breaths, and Lilian covered her swollen eyes with two weak hands.

"I'm sure it isn't just the way you think," said Peggy, after a few minutes. "It couldn't be as bad as all that."

"What couldn't?"

"Why, whatever is the matter."

There was a pause and then came a smothered, "Yes, it could. It is. Oh, and I wanted to come to college so-I wanted to come!"

"Well-and you came, and here you are with all of us," Peggy reminded.

"That's just it," the confidences came now pouring over each other for utterance. Lilian clasped Peggy's cool fingers with a fevered hand. "I wish to goodness that I hadn't ever come. I don't belong. The girls showed me that to-night. Oh, when I think of how my mother kissed me good-bye-and-and gave me up for all this year-just for-this--"

"For what?" helped out Peggy.

"To have the girls make fun of my room, my clothes-and me. Listen, Miss Parsons. We lived in a small town where n.o.body was very well-to-do. And mother-wanted something better for me than she had ever known. When she was a girl she used to dream of going to college--"

Sobs choked the narrator and she struggled for a moment before she could go on.

"And-when I began to grow up, she decided that I should go-oh, Miss Parsons, when I came away she said to remember that I was going for both of us!"

Peggy's fingers tightened around the feverish hand, and she could see very clearly in her mind the face of this girl's mother with its wistful yet self-sacrificing expression, and the tears came suddenly to her eyes.

"She saved, my mother did, for years so that there would be enough-for me-to come on Campus like the other girls," a trace of bitterness crept in here. "But I didn't know how they dressed at a place like this and how they all fixed up their rooms. I didn't realize there would be anything besides the tuition and board-and-I-didn't-know-they couldn't-love me--"

Peggy tore her hand from the other's grasp and went and stood by the desk with her back to the bed. Her eyes fell on a blotted and tear-stained letter which began, "Dear Mother."

"Listen, Lilian," she said, going back to the couch, "I haven't any mother at all. That will seem strange to you, who have seen me laughing around here, happy and singing most of the time. But I haven't,-and I know that nothing ever will quite make up. That letter you have begun-just try to realize that no matter what happens to me,-whatever hard thing I may have to go through, I can't write such a letter as that."

Lilian stared at Peggy in surprise. Why, she had supposed the little Miss Parsons had _everything_.