Taking this as a challenge, all sorts of feats were attempted to prove the superior virtues of each girl’s birthstone charm, so that the performance ended in a gale of romping and laughter.  Then at the last, to the tune of “They kept the pig in the parlour and that was Irish too,” Mary was gravely presented on behalf of the sorority with the gift it had chosen for her.

“For your dowry,” it was marked.  It was a toy savings-bank in the form of a china pig, with a slit in its back, into which each member dropped seventeen pennies, as they sang in jolly chorus,

     “Because it’s your seventeenth birthday,
      March seventeen shall be mirth-day. 
      Oh, may you long on the earth stay,
        With pence a-plenty too.”

“That’s an example in mental arithmetic,” cried A.O.  “Quick, Mary!  Tell us how much your dowry amounts to.  Seventeen times sixteen—­”

But Mary was occupied with a discovery she had just made.  “There are just seventeen of us counting me!” she cried.  “I never knew such a strange coincidence in numbers.”

“If you save all your pennies till you have occasion for a dowry you’ll have enough to buy a real pig,” counselled Cornie wisely.

“More like a whole drove of them,” laughed Mary.  “That time is so far off.”

“Not necessarily so far,” was Cornie’s answer.  “Sometimes it is only a few steps farther when you are seventeen.  Come on, before they turn out the lights on us.”

Mary stopped in the door to look back at the room in which they had spent such a jolly evening.  “I’d like to stop the clock right here,” she declared, “and stay just at this age for years and years.  It’s so nice to be as old as seventeen, and yet at the same time to be as young as that.”

Then she went skipping off to her room with the dowry pig in one hand and a green candle from the cake in the other, to report the affair to Ethelinda.  They were not members of the same sorority, but they had many interests in common now.  They had learned how to adjust themselves to each other.  Mary still reserved her deepest confidences for her shadow-chum, but Ethelinda shared the rest.

CHAPTER XI

TROUBLE FOR EVERYBODY

Up in Joyce’s studio, Easter lilies had marked the time of year for nearly a week.  They had been ordered the day that Betty and Mary arrived to spend the spring vacation, and still stood fresh and white at all the windows, in the glory of their newly opened buds.  They were Henrietta’s contribution.  Mrs. Boyd and Lucy were away.

On the wall over the desk the calendar showed a fanciful figure of Spring, dancing down a flower-strewn path, and Mary, opening her journal for the first time since her arrival, paused to read the couplet at the bottom of the calendar.  Then she copied it at the top of the page which she was about to fill with the doings of the last five days.