Page:Angela Brazil--the leader of the lower school.djvu/16

10 gate was shut with a slam, Lennie Chapman turned to her companions and heaved a tragic sigh.

"Isn't it withering?" she remarked. "And just on the very afternoon when we'd made up our minds to decide the tennis championship, and secured all the courts for the Lower School. I do call it the most wretched luck! I'm a blighted blossom!"

"We'll never persuade the Seniors to give us all the courts again!" wailed Fiona Campbell. "They said so emphatically that it was only to be for this once."

"I believe they knew it was going to be wet!" growled Dilys Fenton.

"You don't think if it cleared a little we might manage just a set before tea?" suggested Norah Bell half hopefully.

"My good girl, please to look at the lawn! Do you think anyone in her senses would try to play on a swamp like that?"

"It's getting too late in the year for tennis," yawned Hetty Hancock. "Don't believe we shall get another game at all. We'd better resign ourselves."

"Resign ourselves to what?" asked Daisy Scatcherd.

"Why, to leaving the championship till next summer, and to not going out to-day, and to sitting stuffing here and moaning our bad luck, and feeling as cross as a bear with a toothache—at least, that's how I feel: I don't know what the rest of you do!"

"I should like to have gone home with the day girls," sighed Dilys Fenton.

"No, you wouldn't!" snapped Norah Bell. "You know it's jollier to be a boarder; we do have some