“I’ve been speaking to Miss May,” announced Miss Davis, coming back to her room when the ten minutes was up.  “She thinks, instead of having you children go home at noon and come back for your snowball fight, that it will be better if you have lunch here and then go out to play in the snow.  Miss May will telephone every child’s mother and ask permission to have you stay here, and she is going to promise that you will all be home by four o’clock.  And now I want you to have the best reading lesson we have had since Christmas.”

The children liked to have luncheon in Miss May’s blue and silver dining-room.  She invited them, one at a time, to have lunch with her, and it was always a pleasant experience.  And to-day it would be great fun not to have to go home and come back again, but to be able to go right out and begin their snow battle as soon as luncheon was over.

The rest of the morning went smoothly, and Miss Davis said she was glad she had given them the extra recess, for they recited very nicely.  When the noon bell rang, it seemed strange instead of going to the cloak room for coats and hats and rubbers, to go upstairs and wash their hands and faces and then come downstairs and go into the dining-room with Miss May and Miss Davis and have Maria bring in their lunch.

“I’d like to have a table like this every noon,” said Miss May, smiling at the circle of little faces that went all around her big mahogany table.  “We’d both like it, shouldn’t we, Miss Davis?”

“I think it would be lovely!” nodded Miss Davis, squeezing Sunny Boy’s hand.  He sat next to her.  “Think of all the questions we could answer, Miss May.”

Miss May laughed and said she didn’t mind answering questions at all.

As soon as lunch was over, Miss Davis helped them get into their coats and wraps and watched them march out to the back lot for their fun.  Jessie Smiley wore a new scarlet sweater that came down to the edge of her dress and was so warm and snug that she said she did not need to wear her coat with it.  Miss Davis said she thought she would be warm enough, too, without the coat, and she knew she could run more easily.

“Not that a good soldier runs,” she explained, laughing a little as she buttoned the sweater under Jessie’s chin.  “But a snowball army soldier has to run, I know.”

Jessie left her rubbers in the cloakroom, too, for she had her rubber boots.  She had worn her rubbers to school that morning.  The boots had been left in the cloakroom since the last snowstorm.  Jessie wanted to wear one rubber and one boot, but Miss Davis said she thought that two boots would be better, so Jessie had taken her advice.

“Whee, there’s a lot of snow!” cried Sunny Boy, wading out into the middle of the lot, followed by his army.  “We ought to get a lot of bullets made.  And a fort.  We must build a fort.”

Oliver took his army over at one end of the lot and set them to work making snowballs.  The boys made more balls than the girls did.  But then the girls were so anxious to make theirs smooth and round that they did not work very quickly.  Sunny Boy soon noticed that Dorothy Peters scraped and packed and patted one snowball while he was making four.