"Is _she_ going?" the tall girl demanded with interest, pointing to this dripping apparition.
"I--don't--think she's planning to go to college at all," said Katherine hesitatingly. "I never heard her say that she was going. I'm her room-mate, and she's the nicest girl in all the world, and Hampton will never know what it loses by not getting her."
"She's just the kind we want," sighed the tall girl. "Well, glad we met you--" Her party started off downstream, but she turned and called back over her shoulder, "When you come up next fall come over and see me,--I'm Ditto Armandale--in Macefield House."
"Thanks, I'm Katharine Foster," Peggy's room-mate called after her. "Good-bye--and I'm really coming."
With a friendly wave the college girls disappeared around the first bend in the little river, and Katherine turned to the perturbed Peggy, expecting her to make some remark about the ridiculous way the others had found her.
But her eyes had a faraway expression in spite of their slightly worried look, and the remark Peggy made was, "Oh, Katherine, Katherine, I wish I were going to Hampton."
Katherine started to speak, but could not, and turned her head hastily away because the thought of four years without Peggy, even four years among hundreds of attractive girls like Ditto Armandale, seemed to her at the minute but a bleak expanse unlit by a single gleam of comfort.
"Peggy, won't you write to your aunt and tell her you _must_ come?" she begged suddenly. "Don't you think she'd let you if she knew that Florence and I and most of the girls are going?"
Peggy rubbed her moist forehead thoughtfully. "Don't think so," she said, "but I might write and--_hint_ that I want to go."
Their momentary depression passed, though, when they sat down to eat the good things they had brought in their boxes. Peggy kept in the sun as much as possible, hoping to dry off before it was time to go home. This phase came to her more poignantly later, however, when the other girls had put on their shoes and stockings again and were making ready to go home.
"But mine are all wet and they won't go on," mourned Peggy, "and my dress is a disgrace and my hair isn't very dry yet either, and when I put my hat on little rivulets run down my face like so many horrid young Niagaras. Oh, there _that_ shoe is on, but I can't say there's any special advantage in it. Just hear the water sloshing about when I walk! It's a wonder I won't take cold out of this, but I won't--I never do when I've had a good time. Girls, keep close to me because I'm the most awful object that ever got on a street car and I'd much rather walk only I wouldn't get home for two or three days, I guess, and these wet shoes would have dissolved like paper long before that."