long and change everything--everything, mind!--and
I'll come around in five minutes and dose you. Run, now; make it a race,
and I'll add hot lemonade to the stakes,--first prize and booby prize!"

"Yes, Miss Cortlandt," cried the two Undines; and off they set in a
shower of spray, with the other girls at their heels.

CHAPTER XII.

AN ADVENTURE.

It all came from Peggy's forgetting her handkerchief. That was nothing
remarkable. Rapidly though our heroine was developing, there was still
plenty of the old Peggy left; and when she looked up at Miss Russell
with a certain imploring gaze, the Principal was apt to say, without
waiting for anything further: "Yes, Peggy, you may; but do try to
remember it next time!"

But this time it was well that Peggy had not remembered it. She stumbled
across the long dining-room quite in her own way, stubbing her toe
against a sophomore's chair, and sending the sophomore's spoon
clattering to the ground. Stooping, in confusion, to pick it up, with
muttered apologies, she encountered the sophomore's head bent down for
the same purpose, and some mutual star-gazing ensued. Finally she did
manage to get out of the room, after cannoning against the door and
taking most of the skin off her nose, and made her way up-stairs
ruefully, rubbing the places that hurt most, and wondering where in her
anatomy lay the "clumsy bone" that her father always talked about. "And
it isn't there all the time!" said poor Peggy. "Sometimes I don't fall
into anything for days, and then, all at once, it's like this!"

Shaking her head dolefully, she reached her own room, got the
handkerchief, remembered with a great effort to shut the drawer, and
came out into the corridor again--to come face to face with a man
emerging from the opposite room.

The opposite room was Vanity Fair; and the man's hands were full of
trinkets and knickknacks, and his pockets bulged in a suspicious way. He
cast a wild glance over Peggy's shoulder at the open door of her room
and the fire-escape beyond; evidently he had entered by that way, and
counted on the dinner-hour's keeping every one below stairs till he got
safe away. Now, however, baffled in this, he turned down the corridor
with some degree of composure.

"Stop!" said Peggy. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

"I'm the plumber, miss," said the man, still walking away.

"Put down those things!" cried Peggy. "Do you hear? or I'll call the
police!"

Appa