A Sweet Girl Graduate | Page 8

her dear, wild Devonshire flowers, among the groups on the door panels. She wondered if all the rest of the students were treated to these artistic decorations and grew a little happier and less homesick at the thought.
Priscilla could have been an artist herself had the opportunity arisen, but she was one of those girls all alive with aspiration and longing who never up to the present had come in the way of special culture in any style.
She stood for some time gazing at the groups of wild flowers, then remembering with horror that she was to receive visitors that night, she looked round the room to see if she could do anything to make it appear homelike and inviting.
It was a nice room, certainly. Priscilla had never before in her whole life occupied such a luxurious apartment, and yet it had a cold, dreary, uninhabited feel. She had an intuition that none of the other students' rooms looked like hers. She rushed to light the fire, but could not find the matches, which had been removed from their place on the mantel-piece, and felt far too shy to ring the electric bell. It was Priscilla's fashion to clasp her hands together when she felt a sense of dismay, and she did so now as she looked around the pretty room, which yet with all its luxuries looked to her cold and dreary.
The furniture was excellent of its kind. A Turkey carpet covered the center of the floor, the boards round the edge were stained and brightly polished. In one corner of the room was a little bed, made to look like a sofa by day, with a Liberty cretonne covering. A curtain of the same shut away the wardrobe and washing apparatus. Just under one of the bay windows stood a writing-table, so contrived as to form a writing-table, and a bookcase at the top, and a chest of drawers to hold linen below. Besides this there was a small square table for tea in the room and a couple of chairs. The whole effect was undoubtedly bare.
Priscilla was hesitating whether to begin to unpack her trunk or not when a light knock was heard at her door. She said "Come in," and two girls burst rather noisily into the apartment.
"How do you do?" they said, favoring the fresh girl with a brief nod. "You came to-day, didn't you? What are you going to study? Are you clever?"
These queries issued rapidly from the lips of the tallest of the girls. She had red hair, tousled and tossed about her head. Her face was essentially commonplace; her small restless eyes now glanced at Priscilla, now wandered over the room. She did not wait for a reply to any of her queries, but turned rapidly to her companion.
"I told you so, Polly," she said. "I was quite sure that she was going to be put into Miss Lee's room. You see, I'm right; this is Annabel Lee's old room; it has never been occupied since."
"Hush!" said the other girl.
The two walked across the apartment and seated themselves on Priscilla's bed.
There came a fresh knock at the door, and this time three students entered. They barely nodded to Priscilla and then rushed across the room with cries of rapture to greet the girls who were seated on the bed.
"How do you do, Miss Atkins? How do you do, Miss Jones?"
Miss Jones and Miss Atkins exchanged kisses with Miss Phillips, Miss Marsh and Miss Day. The babel of tongues rose high, and every one had something to say with regard to the room which had been assigned to Priscilla.
"Look," said Miss Day, "it was in that corner she had her rocking-chair. Girls, do you remember Annabel's rocking-chair, and how she used to sway herself backward and forward in it and half-shut her lovely eyes?"
"Oh, and don't I just seem to see that little red tea-table of hers near the fire," burst from Miss Marsh. "That Japanese table, with the Japanese tea-set-- oh dear, oh dear! those cups of tea-- those cakes! Well, the room was luxurious, was worth coming to see in Annabel's time."
"It's more than it is now," laughed Miss Jones in a harsh voice. "How bare the walls look without her pictures. It was in that recess the large figure of Hope by Burne-Jones used to hang, and there, that queer, wild, wonderful head looking out of clouds. You know she never would tell us the artist's name. Yes, she had pretty things everywhere! How the room is altered! I don't think I care for it a bit now."
"Could any one who knew Annabel Lee care for the room without her?" asked one of the girls. She had a common, not to say vulgar, face, but it wore a wistful expression