as if the pixies had dropped you," laughed Vi.

"Right you are! I guess I'm a pixie sort of girl. Please don't expect
'prunes and prism' from me, for you won't get them!"

"I don't know that we want them," chuckled Wendy.

"That takes a weight off my mind, then," twinkled Diana. "I like
mediaeval abbeys and black beams and raftered roofs, and even ghosts; but
I don't know that I exactly want mediaeval schoolgirls."

"Don't alarm yourself," said Wendy, clapping her on the shoulder. "I
assure you you'll find us all absolutely and entirely modern and
up-to-date."

CHAPTER II

Stars and Stripes

If Diana was possessed with a passion for antiquities, she might
certainly congratulate herself that a kindly fate had popped her into
such an appropriate spot as Pendlemere Abbey. It offered every
attraction to those in search of the romantic and picturesque. The
Cistercian monks who had founded it in the thirteenth century had
exhibited their proverbial good taste in the choice of a situation. It
was built on rising ground above the lake, and commanded a glorious view
across the fells. The garden, with its hill-side of rhododendrons, its
clumps of sweet-smelling pines, and its borders of such hardy flowers as
did not mind the nip of the northern air, ran steeply from a flat
terrace towards the lake, where it ended in a landing-stage and a locked
boat-house. Its orchard linked branches with the apple-trees of a
neighbouring farm. The house itself, though preserving the name and the
traditions of the Abbey, had been converted during Tudor times from
religious to lay uses. Very little of the old monks' building remained
intact, though evidences of it cropped up in unexpected quarters. There
were the remains of a piscina in the pantry; a groined arch roofed the
back kitchen; two carved stone pillars supported the fire-place in the
dining-room; a Gothic doorway led into the courtyard, and the remnants
of some ancient choir stalls were fitted as a window-seat on the stairs.
The Tudor and Elizabethan periods had left more permanent traces, and,
though later architects had played havoc with the simplicity of the
style, they had not altogether destroyed its sixteenth-century
appearance. The greater part was built of northern stone, with mullioned
windows, twisted chimneys, peaked gables surmounted with stone balls,
and a roof of flat slabs of the same yellow-brown stone that formed the
walls. A section of black and white t