LAKE MOLATA
How the girls did enjoy the rest of that afternoon! Connie and Rose
showed them the classrooms and lecture rooms, told them little stories
about the different teachers and recounted funny incidents of school
life that made the girls bubble with laughter.
All the rooms were high-ceilinged, many-windowed and cheerful, but it
was the lecture hall and gymnasium that the girls thought the most
attractive of all.
The lecture room was on the third floor and was arranged in the shape of
a Roman circus, the seats in tiers all around the room with the lecture
platform in the center.
"My, I won't even mind being lectured to in a room like this," said Vi,
in an awed little voice. "Do you have many lectures?"
"Too many," drawled Rose, sinking down in one of the seats and spreading
out her ruffled dress carefully. The girls had been too excited to
notice the dress before, but now they saw it was much more elaborate
than any they had brought with them, except one or two apiece for party
wear.
"I wonder if all the girls dress like that for every day," thought
Billie in a sort of panic, looking down at the pretty little brown cloth
dress she had thought so wonderful at home. She wondered if Vi and Laura
felt the same way.
A little later they wandered downstairs to the gymnasium, and then all
thought of clothes was put in the background.
Around the gymnasium were all sorts of swinging ladders and standing
ladders. There were punching bags and medicine balls; in fact,
everything calculated to make strong healthy women of the girls who came
to Three Towers Hall.
There was a swimming pool, also, and over this the girls went into
raptures. They had had scarcely any opportunity to learn to swim in
North Bend, and although on their visits to New York they had never
failed--that is, in the summer time--to take a dip, or several of them,
in the Atlantic Ocean, they had never learned to swim more than a few
strokes at a time.
"A swimming pool!" cried Billie. "I suppose we might have known we would
have one here. Now we can really learn to swim. I wonder," and so
interested had she been with her own affairs that this was the first
time she had even given the boys a thought, "if Chet and Teddy and Ferd
have a swimming pool at Boxton Academy."
"Boxton Academy?" Rose took her up quickly, suddenly looking interested.
"Do you know any one who goes there?"
"I should say we do," put in Laura proudly. "Billie's----"
"Billie?" Connie interrupted, looking puzzled.
"I'm 'Billie,'" Billie explained, with a laugh. "They call me 'Billie'
for short."
"Never mind about that," Rose put in impatiently. "What were you saying
about the boys?"
The girls looked at pretty, black-haired, pink-cheeked Rose, and Billie
realized suddenly why it was she had not altogether liked the girl.
"She'll be friendly to almost any girl if she happens to like her
brother," she thought, and instinctively she glanced at Laura. The
latter must have had almost the same thought, for she gave Billie a
meaning glance.
"You said they were at Boxton Academy," Rose insisted.
"Tell us about them," said Connie. She was interested, but in an
entirely different sort of way.
"Well, there's Billie's brother and mine and a chum of theirs, Ferd
Stowing. They came with us as far as Molata. Then they left us for the
Academy and we came on here. And we were having such a good time we
never thought about them," she finished penitently.
The girls were eager to look about the grounds of Three Towers after
that, but Rose would not let them go till she had found out all about
the boys and their "life history," as Billie resentfully said later.
After that the girls noticed that she was even more friendly than she
had been before.
"Oh, well," said Billie to herself, feeling strangely comforted by the
thought, "she won't have much of a chance to see the boys, anyway,
because we can only leave the grounds on special permission and they
won't be able to get away from the Academy to come here very often. I
suppose I'm an awful cat," she finished ruefully, "but I'm not going to
let her meet any of our boys if I can help it."
A little later she forgot all about her irritation in the delight of
walking about the beautifully kept grounds of Three Towers and examining
the outside of the picturesque old building itself.
The latter was even more beautiful than they had thought in their first
glimpse of it, with its rugged, ivy-grown walls and its
three-battlemented towers rising above the trees.
"It looks almost like an old castle," cried Billie. "The kind you read
about in 'The Days of Chivalry.' All it needs is a----"
"Moat," finished Laura excitedly. "I was just thinking that, Billie."
"Yes, a moat would make it just perfect," sighed Violet, adding, with a
laugh: "Anyway, even if we haven't the moat, we have a lake."
"Yes, let's go down and look at it," proposed Connie. "We've had
wonderful times on it all summer."
"Doing what?" asked Laura eagerly. "Do they let you row on it--all by
yourselves?"
"I should say not," answered Rose, with a little toss of her head. "You
have to learn to swim in the pool first so that if you upset your boat
you won't get drowned. It's their great boast that no girl has ever been
drowned at Three Towers."
"Well, we don't want to start anything," said Billie, with a little
grimace, and the girls laughed.
"Then," Rose went on, "after you learn to swim you have to take an
instructor out in the rowboat or canoe with you until she thinks you
know how to handle it like an expert."
"What do you mean by an instructor?" asked Vi. "One of the teachers?"
"Sometimes it's a teacher," Connie spoke up. "But as a rule it's one of
the older girls in the first grade who teaches the younger ones. Miss
Walters said," and her fair face flushed with pleasure, "that perhaps
next semester I shall be appointed as instructor."
"Oh, isn't that great?" cried Billie heartily, for she was beginning to
like Connie Danvers with all her heart. Then, too, she had noticed with
a feeling of relief that Connie was not dressed like Rose Belser. She
had on a pretty cloth dress very much like Billie's own. "And she didn't
seem crazy to know all about the boys," she added, with an added warmth
around her heart.
"I wonder," she said aloud, "how long it will take us girls to learn to
become instructors."
"Well, I don't know about the rest of us," spoke up Nellie Bane; "but I
know it won't take you very long, Billie. You were always the very first
to pick up anything."
As with most of the rest of Billie's friends, Nellie shared the
conviction that Billie could do everything she tried to do just a little
bit better than any one else.
"I should say so," Laura added loyally. "There's nothing that you can't
do, Billie."
Billie flushed with pleasure and Rose Belser looked at her with new
interest. For if Rose was not the most popular girl at Three Towers she
certainly thought she was and the praise of Billie's friends started her
thinking. Could it be possible that here was a rival? But she shook her
dark head impatiently. If this Billie Bradley thought she could start
anything, why, she, Rose, would show her, that was all!
And all the time Billie, who had no thought of what was going on in the
other girl's mind, was having the time of her life.
"Look at all the canoes!" she cried. "And they actually have racks for
them."
They had come down to a little dock that jutted out into the lake and
had been hidden from their view, or at least partly so, by the trees.
Now, as they came out upon it, they stood astonished and delighted by
the sight that met their eyes.
There were half a dozen racks on the dock, each one constructed so as to
contain three canoes, one above the other, and every rack was full.
The canoes were each neatly covered with a tarpaulin, but the tarpaulin,
drawn tight, revealed the long graceful outline of each beautiful little
boat, and the girls fairly ached to launch one of them upon the water.
"And there are rowboats, too," cried Vi, making another discovery. "Lots
and lots of them! Look! Here they are--tied to the dock."
Sure enough, there were fully a dozen gaily painted rowboats swaying
gently in the water on either side of the dock, sometimes straining a
little at the ropes that held them.
"But who would row when they could canoe?" cried Billie, for in Billie
was a passion for canoes which Chet had always declared must have come
from her Indian ancestors. "I think rowboats are horribly clumsy."
"Hardly anybody really likes to row," Connie answered, "but we have to
do it for the exercise, Miss Walters says there's no better exercise in
the world than rowing."
"Yes," said Billie, with a little laugh. "And no harder work, either."
"Do you do much swimming in the lake?" asked Nellie, gazing down at her
reflection in the still water.
"Oh, we can," Rose answered. "But no one likes it very much. They'd
rather do their swimming in the swimming pool. There's a mud bottom to
the lake, and the water, though it looks mighty nice, isn't good to
drink."
While they were speaking two girls whom the chums remembered having seen
in the dining hall but did not know came down to the dock, and, after
waving to Rose and Connie, went to a rack and started to take down one
of the canoes.
The girls watched rather wistfully while they slipped it from the rack,
removed the cover, and slid it into the smooth water.
One girl with a skill born of experience jumped into the front seat of
the canoe, lifted one of the paddles and waited while her companion
settled herself in the stern seat. Then they glided from the dock
softly, almost silently but for the dip of the paddles in the water, and
drifted out toward the middle of the lake.
"Oh, if we could only do that," sighed Billie, "I think I'd die happy."
"Those girls are instructors," Connie explained. "They are in the first
grade and expect to graduate in the spring."
"It's funny, I suppose," said Billie, dreamily gazing up at the blood
red sun that was slowly sinking in the western sky, "but I'm really
sorry for them."
"Why?" they asked, surprised.
"Because," said Billie soberly, "they have to graduate and leave Three
Towers!"