“Let me look at your guitar!  Oh, what a beauty!  What’s the label inside?  Juan Da Costa, Seville!  Then it must be Spanish.  I suppose they’re the best.  My mandoline’s Italian; it was made in Milan.  We must tune them together, mustn’t we?  Can you read well?  This is the book of duets.  I thought this Barcarolle would be easy, it has such a lovely swing about it.  Here’s the guitar part.”

CHAPTER IV

The Symposium

By the aid of diligent practicing in private, and several rehearsals at Garnet’s house, the girls at last got their duet to run smoothly.  Garnet was frankly pleased.

“The two instruments go so nicely together!  A mandoline’s ever so much better played with a guitar accompaniment than with the piano.  I say, suppose we were to get an encore!”

“I don’t suppose anything of the sort.”

“Don’t be too modest.  It’s as well to be prepared.”

“I’m not going to practice anything more, so I warn you.”

“Well, take something you know, from your own book.  This song.  I could play the air very softly on the mandoline, and we’d both sing it.  That won’t give you any extra trouble.”

“It isn’t the trouble so much as the state of my fingers.  They’re getting sore.  If I let a blister come, I shan’t be able to play at all.”

“Then for goodness’ sake don’t play any more to-day, and soak your fingers in alum when you get home.”

The general meeting on Tuesday was a very important event, for it marked the opening of the winter session of games and guilds.  During the first week or ten days of the autumn term the girls had enough to do in settling into the work of their new forms, but now October was come everybody began to think about hockey, and to consider the advisability of beginning rehearsals for various Christmas performances.

“I always hate the end of September,” proclaimed Grace Olliver.  “It’s so fine, and the geraniums are still so fresh in the park, that you’re deceived into thinking it’s still summer, yet when you try to play tennis, you find the courts horrible, and you cut up the grass in half an hour.  I’m glad when the leaves all come off, and you know it’s autumn, and you look up your hockey jersey, and think what sport you had last winter over ‘The Dramatic.’  I’m fond enough of cricket, but I’d really rather have winter than summer.  On the whole, there’s more going on.”

“I’m glad Margaret Howell’s head of the school,” replied Evelyn Richards.  “She’s A1 at all the guilds, though I don’t think she’s much chance of being elected Games Captain.”

“All the better.  It’s quite enough for Margaret to act head.  She’s good enough at that, I admit.  Makes an ideal president.  But a girl who’s literary isn’t generally sporty as well.  It stands to reason she can’t do both properly.”

“Meg doesn’t want to be Games Captain; it’s not in her line,” volunteered Beatrice, Margaret’s younger sister.  “She told me to tell you all to vote for Kirsty Paterson.”