such speculations did not, at the time, tie up with views about the
Colorado trip. That was still the guiding star of all her hopes. She
must study harder during the spring term and stave off the threatened
and unspeakable calamity. It was a hard resolution to put through,
especially when she conceived a marvellous idea-a "farce" like one Polly
Currier told her about when she was home for her Easter vacation. Missy
wrestled with temptation like some Biblical martyr of old, but the
thought of Colorado kept her strong. And she couldn't help feeling
a little noble when, mentioning to mother the discarded
inspiration-without allusion to Colorado-she was praised for her
adherence to duty.

The sense of nobility aided her against various tantalizing chances to
prove anew her gifts of leadership, through latter March, through April,
through early May--lengthening, balmy, burgeoning days when Spring
brings all her brightly languid witchery in assault upon drab endeavour.

The weather must share the blame for what befell that fateful Friday of
the second week in May. Blame? Of course there was plenty of blame from
adults that must be laid somewhere; but as for Missy, a floating kind
of ecstasy was what that day woke in her first, and after the worst had
happened--But let us see what did come to pass.

It was a day made for poets to sing about. A day for the young man to
forget the waiting ledger on his desk and gaze out the window at skies
so blue and deep as to invite the building of castles; for even his
father to see visions of golf-course or fishing-boat flickering in the
translucent air; for old Jeff to get out his lawn-mower and lazily add
a metallic song to the hum of the universe. And for him or her who
must sit at schoolroom desk, it was a day to follow the processes of
blackboard or printed page with the eyes but not the mind, while the
encaged spirit beat past the bars of dull routine to wing away in the
blue.

Missy, sitting near an open window of the "study room" during the
"second period," let dreamy eyes wander from the fatiguing Q. E. D.'s of
the afternoon's Geometry lesson; the ugly tan walls, the sober array of
national patriots hanging above the encircling blackboard, the sea of
heads restlessly swaying over receding rows of desks, all faded hazily
away. Her soul flitted out through the window, and suffused itself in
the bit of bright, bright blue showing beyond the stand-pipe, in the
soft, soft air that