“Yes,” said Miss Olaine, who became deeply interested when she thought she had the attention of her class, and the matter under discussion was one that appealed particularly to herself. “What we want in literature is direct and simple English.

“I wish you young ladies to mark this: Epigrams, or flowers of rhetoric, or so-called ‘fine writing,’ does not mark scholarship. The better understanding one has of words and their meanings, the more simply thought may be expressed.

“Do you attend me?” she added, sharply, staring straight at Tavia. “Then to-morrow each of you bring me, expressed in her own language upon paper, her consideration of what simple English means.”

And Tavia received another “condition” for presenting and reading aloud to the class, as requested, the following:

“Those conglomerated effusions of vapid intellects, which posed in lamented attitudes as the emotional and intellectual ingredients of fictional realism,71 fall far short of the obvious requirements of contemporary demands and violate the traditional models of the transcendent minds of the Elizabethan era of glorious memory.”

“You consider yourself very smart, I have no doubt, Miss Travers,” said Miss Olaine, sneeringly, “in inventing a specimen of so-called English exactly opposed to the simple language I demanded. You evidently consider that you have been sent here to school to play. We will see what a little extra work will do for you.”

And so Tavia had certain tasks to perform that kept her indoors on the next Saturday half-holiday. That is why Dorothy chanced to set out alone from the school for a long walk.

It was a cold afternoon, and the sun was hidden. There seemed to be a haze over the whole sky. But there was no snow on the ground, and the latter was as hard as iron and rang under her feet.

Jack Frost had fettered the ponds and streams and frozen the earth, in preparation for the snow that was coming. But Dorothy, not being very weatherwise, did not guess what the atmospheric conditions foretold.

It seemed to her to be a very delightful day for walking, for there was no rough wind, and the paths were so hard. She was only sorry that Tavia was not with her.

72 It was the apparent peacefulness of the day that tempted her off the highroad into a piece of wood with which she was not very familiar. Indeed, she would better have turned back toward the school at the time she entered the wood, for she had then come a long way.

The path she finally struck into was narrow and winding, and the trees loomed thickly on either hand. Before she realized her position, it was growing dusk and fine snow was sifting down upon her—from the thick branches of the trees, she thought at first.

“But no! that can’t be,” urged Dorothy, suddenly, and aloud. “There hasn’t been any snow for a week, and surely that which fell last would not have lain upon the branches so long. I declare! it’s a storm started. I must get back to Glenwood.”

She turned square around—she was positive she did so—and supposedly took the back track. But there were intersecting paths, and all she could see of the sky overhead was a gray blotch of cloud, out of which the snow sifted faster and faster. She had no idea of the points of the compass.

She went on, and on. “I really must get out of this and reach the road,” Dorothy told herself. “Otherwise I shall be drifting about the woods all night—and it’s altogether too cold to even contemplate that as a possibility.”

73 Being cheerful, however, did not culminate in Dorothy’s finding the end of the path at once. And when she did so—coming suddenly out into an open place which she did not recognize—the fine snow was driving down so fast that it almost blinded her.

“This is not the road,” thought the girl, with the first shiver of fear that she had felt. “I have got turned about. I shall have to ask——”

Whom? Through the snow she could see no house—no building of any kind. She stood and listened for several moments, straining her ears to catch the faintest sound above the swish of the driving snow.

There was no other sound. The wind seemed to be rising, and the snow had already gathered to the depth of several inches while she had been rambling in the woods.

“Really,” thought Dorothy. “I never saw snow gather so fast before.”

She had little trouble at first following the path on the edge of the wood. She knew very well it was not the highway; but it must lead somewhere—and to somewhere she must very quickly make her way!

“If I don’t want to be snowed under completely—be a regular lost ‘babe in the wood’—I must arrive at some place very soon!” was her decision.

The path was a cart track. There was a half-covered74 worm-fence on one hand and the edge of the wood on the other. She had no idea whether she was traveling in the direction of Glenwood Hall, or exa............