"Hurrah! I second the motion," cried Katherine Williams.
"All those in favor of this motion will please say 'aye'," said the President.
"Aye," burst from the throats of the eight friends, Otoyo's shrill high note sounding with the others.
"Hurrah for our President," cried Molly, dancing around the room in an excess of happiness.
"_Unitus et concordia_," said Edith gravely.
"It's really Molly that's transformed O'Reilly's into Queen's," continued Margaret, who had a generous, big way of saying things when she chose. "It's Molly who has kept us all together. With Molly and Nance and Judy gone, Queen's would have been a different place."
"It would! It would!" they cried. "Three cheers for Molly Brown!"
"'Here's to Molly Brown, drink her down! Here's to dear old Queen's, drink her down.'"
Through the din of singing and cheering, there came a loud knocking at the door and a voice cried:
Then the door was thrust open and Sallie Marks marched in flourishing a hot-water bag in one hand and a thermos bottle in the other.
"Well," she exclaimed, "you're the most cheerful lot of refugees I ever saw. I came down expecting to find eight frozen corpses stretched on the shining strand, and here you are singing hilarious songs and yelling like a lot of Comanche Indians."
"What are you bringing us, Sallie?" demanded Judy.
"I'm bringing you myself," said Sallie. "I've arranged to come down here. They shelved me with a lot of freshies at Martin's and I said I'd rather be at O'Reilly's with the Old Guard. So Mr. Murphy brought me down with two sheet-loads of my things and some beds from the hospital, and here I am."
"Hurrah!" they cried again, joining hands and dancing in a circle around Sallie.
"'Here's to good old Sallie, drink her down, Drink her down, drink her down, drink her down!'"
After this wild outburst of joy over the return of another wanderer to the fold, Sallie began to remove her outer wrappings.
"I feel like an Egyptian mummy," she remarked as she skinned off two long coats and unwound several scarfs.
"You look like a pouter pigeon," said Judy, "what have you got stuffed in there?"
"Mail," said Sallie, unbuttoning another jacket, "mail for Queen's. Mr. Murphy gave it to me when he came to get my things. And, by the way," she added, "I saved my rocking chair and sat in it as I drove down to the village. Wasn't it beautiful? I suppose I'll be lampooned now as 'Sallie, the emigrant.' But it was too cold to care much. I was only thankful I had taken the precaution to fill the hot-water bag and the thermos bottle before I started on the drive."