On the 21st of January Miss Teddington had a birthday. She would have suppressed the fact altogether if possible, or treated it in quite a surreptitious and off-hand fashion, but with her autograph plainly written in forty-nine separate birthday-books the Fates were against her. She was obliged to receive the united congratulations of the school, to accept, with feigned surprise, the present which was offered her, and to say a few appropriate words of appreciation and thanks. She did not do it well, for her manner was always abrupt, and even verged on the ungracious, the greatest contrast to the bland and tactful utterances of Miss Bowes.
This year the annual ceremony was gone through as usual: Catherine, as head girl, proffered the good wishes and the volume of Carlyle; Lucy Morris, on behalf of the Nature Study Union, handed a bouquet of polyanthus, rosemary, periwinkle, pansies, and pink daisies culled from the garden, the earliness of which Miss Teddington remarked upon, as though she had not watched their progress for the last week.
"I'm very much obliged to you all," she said jerkily, looking nevertheless as if she were longing to bolt for the door.
But she was not yet to make her escape. There was another time-honoured ceremony to be observed. All eyes were turned to Miss Bowes, who rose as usual to the occasion.
"I think, girls," she said pleasantly, "that, considering it is Miss Teddington's birthday, we ought to take some special notice of the occasion. Suppose we ask her to grant a holiday, so that we may make an expedition in her honour. Who votes for this?"
Forty-nine hands were instantly raised, and forty-nine voices cried "I do!" Miss Teddington, who utterly disapproved of odd holidays during term-time, submitted with what grace she could muster, and gave a rather chilly assent, which was immediately drowned in a storm of clapping. The girls, who always suspected the Principals of an annual argument on the subject, felt they had scored for this year at any rate, and were certainly one holiday to the good.
There was no question at all as to where they should walk. Every 21st January, weather permitting, they turned their steps in the same direction. On certain portions of the marsh, near the river, grew fields of wild snowdrops, and to go snowdropping before February set in was as much an institution as turning their money when they first heard the cuckoo, or wishing at the sight of the earliest white butterfly. As a matter of fact, though the delicate fiction of asking for the holiday was preserved, it was such a _sine qua non_ that the cook was prepared for it. She had baked jam tartlets and made potted meat the day before, and was already cutting sandwiches and packing them in greaseproof paper. Every girl at The Woodlands possessed a basket, just as she owned a penknife or a French dictionary. It was equally indispensable. She would carry out her lunch in it, and bring it back filled with flowers, berries, or nature specimens, as the case might be. Each was labelled with the owner's name, and hung in a big cupboard under the stairs. Some of the girls also used walking-sticks with crooked handles, which were found convenient weapons for hooking down brambles or branches of catkins.