"Vivian won't be long," Janie assured her. "She is the most dependable person I know; when she says she'll do a thing, she does it. Oh, here she is now!"
Honor sprang to the door, but her face fell as she saw the monitress arrive empty-handed.
"I'm dreadfully sorry!" announced Vivian. "Barbara decided, after all, to be Oliver Cromwell, so of course she wanted the cloak, boots, and pistol. I've brought you a few bangles and a wreath of flowers, if they'll be of any use to you; I've nothing else left. I must fly! I've to get into my own costume."
Poor Honor! It was a bitter disappointment. She had counted so much on representing Dick Turpin that to have to forgo the part seemed little short of a tragedy.
"I can't do a highwayman in nothing but a pair of corked moustaches!" she exclaimed dolefully.
"It is a pity," sympathized Janie, "but of course it can't be helped. If we're very quick we shall just have time to think of something else. Could you manage a fairy, with the bangles and the wreath and a white petticoat?"
"A fairy! No! Do I look like a fairy? I'm so cross, it would have to be a goblin. I know what I'll do; I shall go as an Arab."
"With the towels wound round you, I suppose?"
"They're not big enough; I must use my sheets," and Honor, suiting her action to her words, ruthlessly disarranged her bed.
If the towels were too small, the sheets proved too large. In spite of Janie's efforts (much hampered by her cassock and cowl) they refused to drape elegantly. Honor lost all patience at last, and, seizing her scissors, ripped the offending sheets in halves with uncompromising fingers.
"Oh, Honor, what have you done? How could you? Oh, what will Miss Maitland say?" shrieked Janie, almost in tears.
"I don't care!" declared Honor recklessly.
In her present excited state she would have torn up her best dress with equal readiness. She was elated with her success in the cricket field--what the Scotch call "fey"; and so long as she gratified her present whim, she had no thought at all for the future.
"I must have some costume," she continued, "and we ought to go downstairs at once. They're my own sheets, so what does it matter? It isn't as if they were school property; I brought them from home with the rest of my linen--they're marked 'H. Fitzgerald' in the corner."