Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/174



went back to school and saw the following months of work and play go by in a dizzy procession of speeding days. Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed to stop a little longer than the others; he spent the one at a  town on one of the Great Lakes, ice-boating,  and the other in Chicago, where he had some  cousins. They were pleasant days and weeks and months; yet he saw them go by with some  satisfaction, for he looked forward greatly to  the time when his father and mother would  come home.

The Easter vacation approached and, on account of some alterations to the school buildings, was made much longer than usual. Billy, however, could get little satisfaction out of even such unexpected good fortune, for letters from South America had been becoming  more and more doubtful as to the chance of 154