The guests of Hercules

								

Her arms hung at her sides, lost in the folds of her veil. Slowly tears
filled her eyes, but did not fall until a delicate sound of
light-running feet on grass made her start, and wink the tears away.
They rolled down her white cheeks in four bright drops, which she
hastily dried with the back of her hand; and no more tears followed.
When she was sure of herself, she turned and saw a girl running to her
from the house, a pretty, brown-haired girl in a blue dress that looked
very frivolous and worldly in contrast to Mary's habit. But the bushes
and the sundial, and the fading flowers that tapestried the ivy on the
old wall, were used to such frivolities. Generations of schoolgirls,
taught and guarded by the Sisters of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake, had
played and whispered secrets along this garden path.
"Dearest Mary!" exclaimed the girl in blue. "I begged them to let me
come to you just for a few minutes--a last talk. Do you mind?"
Mary had wanted to be alone, but suddenly she was glad that, after all,
this girl was with her. "You call me 'Mary'!" she said. "How strange it
seems to be Mary again--almost wrong, and--frightening."
"But you're not Sister Rose any longer," the girl in blue answered.
"There's nothing remote about you now. You're my dear old chum, just as
you used to be. And will you please begin to be frivolous by calling me
Peter?"
Mary smiled, and two round dimples showed themselves in the cheeks still
wet with tears. She and this girl, four years younger than herself, had
begun to love each other dearly in school days, when Mary Grant was
nineteen, and Mary Maxwell fifteen. They had gone on loving each other
dearly till the elder Mary was twenty-one, and the younger seventeen.
Then Molly Maxwell--who named herself "Peter Pan" because she hated the
thought of growing up--had to go back to her home in America and "come
out," to please her father, who was by birth a Scotsman, but who had
made his money in New York. After three gay seasons she had begged to
return for six months to school, and see her friend Mary Grant--Sister
Rose--before the final vows were taken. Also she had wished to see
another Mary, who had been almost equally her friend ("the three Maries"
they had always been called, or "the Queen's Maries"); but the third of
the three Maries had disappeared, and about her going there was a
mystery which Reverend Mother did not wish to have broken.
"Peter," Sister Rose echoed obediently, as the younger girl clasped her
arm, making her walk slowly toward the sundial at the far end of the
path.
"It does sound good to hear you call me that again," Molly Maxwell said.
"You've been so stiff and different since I came back and found you
turned into Sister Rose. Often I've been sorry I came. And now, when
I've got three months still to stay, you're going to leave me. If only
you could have waited, to change your mind!"
"If I had waited, I couldn't have changed it at all," Sister Rose