Angela Brazil

The School by the Sea Angela Brazil

GIRLS! Girls everywhere! Girls in the passages, girls in the hall, racing upstairs and scurryingdownstairs, diving into dormitories and running into classrooms, overflowing on to the landing andhustling along the corridor-everywhere, girls! There were tall and short, and fat and thin, and alldegrees from pretty to plain; girls with fair hair and girls with dark hair, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, andgrey-eyed girls; demure girls, romping girls, clever girls, stupid girls-but never a silent girl. No!Buzz-hum-buzz! The talk and chatter surged in a full, steady flow round the house till the noiseinvaded even that sanctuary of sanctuaries, the private study, where Miss Birks, the Principal, sataddressing post cards to inform respective parents of the safe arrival of the various individualmembers of the frolicsome crew which had just reassembled after the Christmas vacation. Inordinary circumstances such an indiscretion as squealing on the stairs or dancing in the passageswould have brought Miss Birks from her den, dealing out stern rebukes, if not visiting dire justice onthe offenders; but for this one brief evening-the first night of the term-the old house was LibertyHall. Each damsel did what seemed good in her own eyes, and talked, laughed, and joked to herheart's content."Let them fizz, poor dears!" said Miss Birks, smiling to herself as a special outburst of mirth waswafted up from below. "It does them good to work off steam when they arrive. They'll have to bequiet enough to-morrow. Really, the twenty make noise enough for a hundred! They're all ondouble-voice power to-night! Shades of the Franciscans, what a noise! It seems almost sacrilege in anold convent."If indeed the gentle, grey-robed nuns who long, long ago had stolen silently along those very samestairs could have come back to survey the scene of their former activities, I fear on this particularoccasion they would have wrung their slim, transparent hands in horror over the stalwart modernmaidens who had succeeded them in possession of the ancient, rambling house. No pale-facednovices these, with downcast eyes and cheeks sunken with fasting; no timid glances, no soft etherealfootfalls or gliding garments-the old order had changed indeed, and yielded place to a rosy, racy, healthy, hearty, well-grown set of twentieth-century schoolgirls, overflowing with vigorous younglife and abounding spirits, mentally and physically fit, and about as different from their mediaevalforerunners as a hockey stick is from a spindle. Among the jolly, careless company that on this January evening held carnival in the vaultedpassages, and woke the echoes of the time-hallowed walls, no two had abandoned themselves to thefun of the moment more thoroughly than Deirdre Sullivan and Dulcie Wilcox.