A packet of white, bound with an elastic, went flying through the air, to fall with a rustling plop into the half-empty caldron. An inquisitive senior going out to investigate spied only the deserted stairs, and heard nothing but four scampering feet on the corridor overhead. Saint Valentine, with a voice that dropped lower and lower into a muffled murmur, read her own name fifteen times in succession, and blushed rose-pink, from gray beard to powdered hair, while the other seniors laughed and laughed.

Two minutes after the valentines had been counted and the result announced Bea was waltzing about Berta's room, with that unwilling captive in her arms.

"Ho! Who says your senior is more popular than my senior now?" she jeered. "Who won that time, I want to know?"

"Before I'd have a senior who sends valentines to herself!" grumbled Berta wickedly, to the ceiling.

"Ho!" chanted shameless Bea. "I knew it was a mistake all along. That's the reason I didn't tear up my valentines."

"Yes?" commented Miss Berta, with an inflection so maddening that in three seconds she was fleeing for her life.



CHAPTER V

THE GIFTIE GIE US

It had been raining for a week. Berta was writing a poem, her elbows on the desk, her hair clutched in one hand, her pen in the other. At the window Robbie Belle was working happily over her curve-tracing, now and then drawing back to gaze with admiration at the sweeping lines of her problem. Once the slanting beat of the drops against the pane caught her eye, and she paused for a moment to consider their angle of incidence. She decided that she liked curves better than angles. She did not wonder why, as Berta would have done, but having recognized the fact of preference turned placidly back to her instruments.

Splash! came a fiercer gust of rain, and Berta stirred uneasily, tossing her head as if striving subconsciously to shake off a vague irritation of hearing. Another heavier sound was mingling with the steady patter. Rub-a-dub-dub, rub-a-dub-dub! Robbie Belle glanced up and listened, her pencil uplifted.

"It's Bea," she said, "she's drumming with her knuckles on the floor in the corridor. She says that it is against her principles to knock on the door when it has an engaged sign on it. Shall I say come?"

Apparently Berta did not hear the question. With her chin grasped firmly in one fist, she was staring very hard at a corner of the ceiling where there was nothing in particular. Robbie looked at her and sighed, but the resignation in the sigh was transfigured by loving awe. She picked up her pencil in patient acquiescence. Berta must not be disturbed.

"Chir-awhirr, chir-awhirr, tweet, tweet, tweet!" It was Bea's best soprano, with several extra trills strewn between the consonants. "Listen to the mocking-bird. Oh, the mocking-bird is singing on the bough. Bravo, encore! Chir-awhirr! Encore!

"'Make me over, Mother April, When the sap begins to stir. When thy flowery hand delivers All the mountain-prisoned rivers, And thy great heart throbs and quivers To revive the joys that were, Make me over, Mother April, When the sap begins to stir.'"

Robbie Belle was leaning back in her chair to listen in serene enjoyment. She loved to hear Bea sing. Berta was listening, too, but with an absent expression, as if still in a dream.

The voice outside the door declared itself again. "Ahem, written by Bliss Carmen. Sung by Beatrice Leigh. Ahem!" It was a noticeably emphatic ahem, and certainly deserved a more appreciative reply than continued silence from within. After a minute's inviting pause, the singer piped up afresh.

"'Make me over in the morning From the rag-bag of the world. Scraps of deeds and duds of daring, Home-brought stuff from far-sea faring, Faded colors once so flaring, Shreds of banners long since furled, Hues of ash and hints of glory From the rag-bag of the world.' Ahem!"

The concluding cough was so successfully convulsive that Robbie Belle's mouth opened suddenly.

"It must be something important," she said.

Berta woke up from her trance. "Come!" she called.

At the first breath of the syllable, the door flew open with a specially prepared bang, and Bea shot in with an instantaneous and voluntary velocity that carried her to the centre of the rug.

"Oh, girls!" she exclaimed in the excited tone of a breathless and delighted messenger bringing great and astonishing news, "it's raining!"

In the ensuing stillness, she could almost hear the disgusted thud of expectation dashed to earth.

"Villain!" said Berta, and swung around to her interrupted poem.

Robbie's puzzled stare developed slowly into a smile. "I think that is a joke," she said.

Then Bea laughed. She collapsed on the sofa and shook from her boots to her curls. It was contagious laughter that made Robbie chuckle in sympathy and Berta grin broadly at a discreet pigeon-hole of her desk. When the visitor resumed sufficient self-possession to enable her to enunciate, she sat up and inquired anxiously,

"Did you hear me sing?"

Berta regarded her solemnly. "We did," she answered.

"Yes," said Robbie Belle.

"Well, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to change. I'm going to be made over, Mother April. I'm going to turn into a genius for a while. I've always wanted to be a genius. It's no fun to be systematic and steady and conscientious, and so forth, is it, Robbie Belle? At least it isn't very much fun, considering what might be done with our opportunities. So I intend to behave as if I had an artistic temperament. I am going to let my work pile up, cut late, skip meals, break engagements, never answer letters, give in to moods, be generally irresponsible, and so forth, just like Berta. I'm going to——"

"What!"

Bea laughed again mischievously at the sound of outraged dignity in Berta's voice. "Yes, I am. I have the spring fever: I don't want to do anything, and I don't want to do nothing either. In fact, this is the single solitary thing I do want to do. That's the reason why it will be so agreeable to be a genius. At least, it will be agreeable to me, if not to my contemporaries and companions. I shall do exactly as I please at the moment. Another reason will be the thrill of novelty—I'm simply dying for excitement."

"Thrill of novelty!" groaned Berta. "I infer that you never do as you please. You continually 'sackerifice' yourself——"

"Yes, yes, of course, but I was afraid you hadn't noticed." Bea raised her fingers to smooth the corners of her mouth straight. "Now, you've been growing worse—I mean, more and more of a genius ever since entering college. I myself ought to be called Prexie's Assistant, somewhat after the order of Miss Edgeworth's 'Parent's Assistant,' you know, because my career has been such an awful warning to the undergraduate. But you're an example——"

"I am not a genius," Berta spoke with biting severity of accent; "Lucine Brett is a genius, and I despise her."

"You used to despise her," put in Robbie Belle gently.

Berta caught her lip between her teeth for a fleeting instant of irritation, for she was not naturally meek. Then she glanced at Robbie with a quick smile all the sweeter for the under-throb of repentance over her impatient impulse. "All right, I used to long ago. But to return to our guest. I am not a genius, I hasten to remark again. Furthermore I shall be excessively obliged if Miss Leigh will march out of this apartment and stay where she belongs."

In the pause which was occupied by Bea in considering a choice of retorts stupendous, Robbie spoke again.

"I think Bea misses Lila while she is in the infirmary," she said.

Bea swung magnificently on her heel. "I have decided that the proper rejoinder is a crushing silence. I wish you good afternoon." At the door she halted. "And I shall be a genius for a spell. You just watch me and see. Shelley was lawless, you know, and Burns and Carlyle, I guess, and Goethe and George Eliot——"



"What!"

This was a shout of such indignation that Bea vanished instanter. A moment later she poked her head around the lintel.

"Well, they were," she said, "and so are you. It is a marvel to me how you hoodwink Prexie about your work. Pure luck! Vale!"

Berta's repartee consisted of a sofa pillow aimed accurately at the diminishing crack.

The next day was Saturday. Bea failed to appear at breakfast—a catastrophe which had not occurred before in the memory of the oldest junior. Berta who usually arrived herself half an hour late headed a procession of inquiring friends, three of whom bore glasses of milk and plates of rolls to supply the dire omission. A succession of crescendo taps at her door was at length rewarded by a drowsy-eyed apparition in bath-robe and worsted slippers.

"Oh, thank——" she exclaimed at sight of the sympathetic group, and suddenly remembered that she must be different from her ordinary self. "I don't want anything to eat. I didn't feel exactly like getting up early. I seem to prefer to be alone this morning." And she managed, though with a hand that faltered at the misdeed, to shut the door in their astonished faces.

"Well, I never!" "What has happened?" "Was it a telegram?" "How perfectly atrocious!" "Is she sick?" "Beatrice Leigh to treat us with such unutterable rudeness!"

Berta listened with a queer little smile on her sensitively cut lips. Once she noticed a hasty twist of the knob as if Bea had snatched at it from the other side under the prick of the comments floating over the transom. As she walked slowly away the smile faded before a shadowing recollection. She was wondering if her own manner had truly been so unpardonable on that autumn morning when Robbie had carried her a baked apple with cream on it and plum bread besides. It had certainly been irritating to be interrupted in the middle of that rondel for the sake of which she had skipped Sunday breakfast. She had not forgotten how amazed and disappointed Robbie had looked with the saucer in one hand, the plate in the other, while the door swung impatiently back to its place. But then, the poem was sufficient excuse for that discourtesy, Berta assured herself in anxiety to justify her behavior. If she had waited to be polite, the thought and the rhymes would doubtless have scattered beyond recall. Nobody could condemn her for slamming the door and hurrying again to her desk. She had saved the rondel, and it had been printed in the Monthly. That was worth some sacrifice, even of manners to dear old Robbie. She always understood and forgave such small transgressions of the laws of friendship. Only it certainly looked different when somebody else did it.

An hour or so later while Berta was bending devotedly over her notes in the history alcove of the library, she was vaguely aware of a newcomer sauntering carelessly behind her chair. A heavy book clattered to the floor, and somebody's elbow in stooping to pick it up nudged her arm. Her pen went scratching in a mad zigzag across the neat page and deposited a big tear of red ink where it suddenly stopped.

"Oh, I'm sorry," exclaimed Bea repentantly, for she was indeed the culprit; "it's horrid to be heedless on purpose. I didn't know it would really do any harm."

Berta glanced up quickly from her blotter. So Bea considered a reckless disregard for books and persons also a quality of genius. Berta felt a slow blush creeping up to her brow at the candid memory of her tendency to bump into things and brush against people when in a dreamy mood—and to pass on without even a beg pardon.

"You're evidently new to the business, my cautious and calculating young friend," she whispered, "you should have ignored the resultant calamity. Ah—why, child!" she stared in surprise, "your collar is pinned crooked and your turnover is flying loose at one end, and your hair is coming down. You look scandalous."

Bea looked triumphant also. "It's an artistic disarray," she explained. "It's hard work because I've slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn't give the same effect as yours. Does yours feel loose and straggly?"

Berta's hand flew to her head. "You sinner! Mine is just as usual."

"Yes, I know it," assented Bea innocently, "it's a negligee style. I'm being a geni——"

"Go away!" Berta snatched up her bottle of red ink. "Fly, villain, depart, withdraw, retreat, abscond, decamp,—in short, go away!"

Bea went, holding her neck stiffly on one side to balance the sensation of unsteadiness above her ears. Berta watched her with a wavering expression that veered from wrathful amusement to uneasy reflectiveness. Was it really true that she dressed so untidily as this little scamp made out? Perhaps she did slight details once in a while, but though not scrupulously dainty like Lila, still she tried to be neat enough on the whole. Could it be possible that the other girls criticised her so severely as this?

The suspicion bothered her so effectually that she left the library five minutes early and hurried to her room for a few renovating touches before luncheon. Her hair caused her such extraordinary pains that she was late in reaching the table. She found that Bea had usurped her place at the head, but forgot to object in the confusion of being greeted with: "Heigho, Berta, what's happened?" "You're spick and span enough for a party." "Are you going to town this afternoon?"

"Young ladies!" Berta ignored the warm color that she felt rising slowly under her dark skin, "I am astonished at your manners. Don't you know that you should never refer to an individual's personal appearance? I read that in a book on etiquette. You may allude to my money, to my brains, to the beauty of my soul, but you must not remark upon my looks. I don't understand the principle of the thing, unless it is that compliments on the other three articles fail to injure the character, whereas flattery with regard to my pulchritude——"

Bea's hand shot into the air and waved frantically.

"Please, teacher, what is that funny word?"

"Go to the Latin lexicon, thou ignoramus."

"I can't," said Bea, "you borrowed mine and never brought it back. It's being a——"

"But aren't you going anywhere?" asked Robbie Belle who had been filling Berta's plate and pouring her milk during the discourse.

Bea sent a bewitching smile straight into Berta's eyes. "I'm 'most sure she is going to give me a swimming lesson at half past four. Then if it is still raining this evening, we can all swim over to the chapel for the concert. Please, Berta."

"All right," acquiesced Berta carelessly. "I will do it because I am so noble and you are a literary person, though how in this world of incomprehensibilities you managed to get elected to that editorial board passes my powers of apperception. Robbie, will you be so kind as to reach me that saltcellar?"

"You ought to say, 'Salt!' at the beginning, and then while you are putting in the rest of the words, she can be handing it over," advised Bea; "ah, what was the thought I was about to think?"

She paused in dispensing the main dish and rolled up her eyes vacantly for a moment before she dropped the spoon without a glance at the cloth to see if it left a stain and rising walked dreamily out of the dining-room.

The other girls stared. Robbie looked alarmed till Gertrude caught the likeness and explained: "It's 'sincerest flattery' for you, Berta. Imitation, you understand. When an idea strikes you, you drop everything and wander away while Robbie or Bea picks up the spoon and goes on ladling out the stuff in the dish at your place. What a monkey!"

"No, a missionary," corrected Berta, her eyes and mouth contradicting each other as usual. This time her eyes tried to hide a troubled spark in their depths while her mouth twitched over the joke of it all. "She is posing as an awful example."

"Here I am again!" Bea appeared suddenly in her seat. "I find I'm considerably hungry still," she vouchsafed in response to a chorus of taunts and jeers. "Ideas aren't filling, so to speak. At least, mine aren't—and they most of them belong to other people; hence I infer that other people's aren't either. Is that plain, my dear young and giddy friends? Now, somebody, applesauce!" she called, and added politely, "please pass it."

Berta regarded her sternly. "Beatrice Leigh, you are running this scheme pretty far into the ground. When you reach bed-rock, something is likely to get a bump. Take care! Remember!"

"Thank you, yes, Berta. Half-past four at the swimming-tank in the gymnasium. I'll be there. Trust me!"

"Trust you!" echoed Berta in withering scorn.

Bea lifted a face bearing a suitably wounded expression.

"I trust you," she murmured in touchingly plaintive tones. "I shall be in the water at the stroke of the half hour—in the icy water. Promise that you will not fail me."

"All right!" Berta dismissed the engagement from her mind with a heedless assent. An hour later while she was absorbed in looking over the week's daily themes which she had found in the box, Robbie walked in rather disconsolately.

"Bea's writing a poem, too," she said; "she scowled at me."

Berta frowned in abstraction. "Yes," she muttered, "yes, yes."

Robbie looked at her and then stared out at the steady pall of rain. "I think I shall go swimming with you, if you want me."

"Do come." It was a mechanical response while Berta's eyes narrowed in the intensity of her application. "Now I wonder what that question-mark on the margin can mean. She is the vaguest critic I ever had. Suggestive, I reckon, and nothing else."

Robbie sighed. "Bea always used to be interested in everything. I wish she wouldn't write poems. She walked right past four girls and didn't see them. They were astonished. They asked me if she was sick or anything. Her eyes were sort of rolled up in her head, as if she were being oblivious on purpose."

"Um-m," replied Berta brilliantly from the depths of her own obliviousness, "quite likely. Alas! there is another questionable question-mark. I do wish she weren't so stingy with her red ink."

Robbie sighed again and looked at the clock. "It will be half past four in two hours," she volunteered.

Berta pushed back her hair with an impatient gesture. "Robbie Belle, the longer it rains, the more loquacious you become. Do go and write a note to Lila, or darn stockings or something. I have a committee meeting at three, and you bother me dreadfully, with your chatter. Do run along, there's a dear."

Robbie rose and wandered away forlornly. Even though she did not feel like studying, she half wished that she had not finished the preparation of Monday's lessons. College on a rainy Saturday afternoon, when all your friends are writing poems, is not a very cheerful place.

At half-past four Berta was in the midst of a fiery argument about the program for the Junior Party to the seniors. The dispute concerned some fine point of aesthetic taste in the choice of paper and position of monogram. The stroke of the half hour reminded her of the engagement with Bea, but she lightly pushed aside the thought as of no consequence in comparison with the present emergency.

It was ten minutes to five when she seized an umbrella and scurried across the campus to the gymnasium. There in the dusk of fading light from the clouded sky outside she beheld the swimming-tank deserted, its surface still glinting in soft ripples as if from recent plunging.

At sound of a rustle in one of the dressing-rooms, Berta called Bea's name. It was Robbie's voice that answered her.

"Bea's gone out walking."

"Out walking?" echoed Berta scandalized and incredulous.

"Yes, she was here in the water at half-past four, just as she had said she would be. She waited for you, and tried to swim at the end of a curtain pole. I held it steady for her, but when she was the teacher, she let me duck under. And we weren't sure about the stroke anyhow. And we kept getting colder and colder."

"Oh!" the voice sounded as if suddenly enlightened. "At what time did you go in?"

"It was after three, and she waited for you till twenty minutes to five. Then she said she thought it would be interesting to go up to the orchard and gather apple-blossoms with rain-drops fresh on the petals. She said it would be poetic and erratic and a lot of fun. So she went. She said it would be more like a real genius if she went alone, and so I didn't go with her. Besides that, she took my umbrella, and it isn't big enough for two."

"It is queer that she did not wait longer," commented Berta wonderingly.

"She said it would be more whimsical and unexpected to stroll off in that eccentric way. She explained how she is being made over, Mother April, from the rag-bag of the world; and so she has to be different."

"I hope that she gets very wet indeed," said Berta, "and I don't see why I should worry."

Robbie's voice answered, "Bea worried about you that day last fall when you went off alone in that storm to find fringed gentians. The branches were crashing down in the wind, and one girl had seen a tramp out on that lonely road. You said you could take care of yourself, but we worried."

"Oh, that was different," exclaimed Berta. "I am perfectly capable of judging for myself. But Bea is such a scatterbrain that I can't help feeling"—she hesitated, then added as if to herself, "There isn't any sense in feeling responsible. She is old enough——"

"I can't hear when you mumble," called Robbie.

"Bea is an awful idiot," replied Berta in a louder key. "Did you catch that valuable bit of information, Robbie Belle?"

"It sounds," spoke Robbie with unexpected astuteness, "as if you are really worrying after all."

"Does it?" groaned Berta; "well, then I am an idiot too."

She sternly refused to look anxious even when the dressing-gong found the wanderer still absent in the rain. At six Berta started for the dining-room, leaving Robbie hovering at Bea's open door with a supply of hot water, rough towels, dry stockings, and spirits of camphor. In the leaden twilight of the lower corridor a draggled figure passed with a sodden drip of heavy skirts and the dull squashing of water in soaked shoes.

"Where are the apple-blossoms?" asked Berta in polite greeting as they met at the elevator.

"I've b-b-b-been studying b-b-b-bobolinks," Bea's teeth chattered. "It's original to follow birds in the rain."

"But"—Berta's eyes snapped, "I myself when I did it I wore a gym suit and a mackintosh and rubber boots. Of all the idiots!"

"'O wad some power the giftie gie us,'" chanted Bea's tongue between clicks,

"'To see oursels as ithers see us, It wad fra mony a blunder free us, And foolish notion.'"

Then as Berta took a threatening step in her direction, she broke into a run. "I think I'll take some exercise now," she called back mockingly as she fled up the stairs.

At midnight Berta was roused wide awake by an insistent rapping on the wall between her room and Bea's. Startled at last wide awake, she asked what was the trouble. Upon receiving no audible reply, she hurried around through the corridor to the door. She heard the key turned as she grasped the knob. An instant later she felt Bea sway against her and stand choking for breath, her hands to her chest.

"It's croup," she gasped. "The doctor! Run!"

Berta ran. She ran as she had never run before. Down the endless corridor and up the stairs, two steps at a time. Then a hail of frantic knocks on the doctor's door brought her rushing to answer. In four minutes they were back beside Bea's bed, and the doctor's orders kept Berta flying, till after a limitless space of horror and struggle she heard dimly from the distance: "She'll do now." Whereupon Berta sat down quietly in a chair and fainted.

The next day was Sunday. Berta carried Bea her breakfast.

"Good-morning, Beatrice," she said. "I've decided that I am tired of being a genius."

"So am I," said Bea.

"No more poems!" cried Robbie Belle and clapped her hands. "Oh, goodie!"



CHAPTER VI

A WAVE OF REFORM

Bea did her hair high for the first time in public on the evening of the Philalethean Reception in her sophomore year. As was to have been expected, this event of vital importance demanded such careful preparation that she missed the address in chapel altogether and was late for the first dance. When at last she really put in an appearance—and a radiant appearance it was, with cheeks flushed from the ardor of her artistic labors, she found the revelry in full swing, so to speak. The corridors and drawing-rooms were thronged with fair daughters and brave sons. Naturally the daughters were in the majority, most of them fair with the beauty of youth. The sons were necessarily brave to face the cohorts of critical eyes that watched them from all sides.

Two of the critical eyes belonged to Bea as she stood on the stairs for a few minutes and mourned that her handsomest cousin was not there to admire her new white crepe, and also to be admired of the myriad guestless girls. She caught a glimpse of Lila in rose-colored mull as she promenaded past with a cadet all to herself. Berta and Robbie were walking together in the ceaseless procession from end to end of the second floor corridor, while the orchestra played and the couples whirled in the big dining-room. They were talking just as earnestly as if they had not seen each other every day for a year. Bea's dimple twinkled and she took a step forward under the impulse to join them for the fun of chaffing them about such polite devotion.

At that moment Gertrude touched her shoulder.

"Oh, Beatrice Leigh, have you anybody engaged for this number and the next? My brother has turned up unexpectedly, and I haven't a single partner for him. Won't you take care of him while I rush around to fill his program? Do! There's a dear!"

"All right," said Bea, "can he talk?"

"N-no, not much, but you can, and he's awfully easy to entertain. Tell him about the girls or college life or anything. He's interested in it all. Will you? Oh, please! There goes Sara now. I've got to catch her first thing."

"Bring on the brother," exclaimed Bea magnanimously, "I'll talk to him."

And she did. Twenty minutes later, when Gertrude in her frantic search through the shifting crowds explored the farthest group of easy chairs in senior corridor, she discovered Miss Bea still chattering vivaciously to a rapt audience of one.

"I've been telling him about our playing at politics last month," she paused to explain; "he was interested."

The brother smiled down at her. "It is certainly a most entertaining story," he said.

"Things generally are when Bea tells them," commented Gertrude, "that is one of her gifts."

"Oh, thank you!" Bea swept her a curtsey. "But don't hurry. Didn't you know that I promised him a dance as a reward for listening to my dissertation on reform. Some day I'll maybe tell you the story."

This is the story:

Did Gertrude ever tell you about our playing at politics when we were sophomores? Possibly you have heard politics defined as present history, and history as past politics. On that understanding, this tale is a history. It is the history of a great reform. When I sit down to reflect, a luxury for which I seldom have time even in vacation, it really seems to me that I have been reforming all my life. Lila has reformed a good deal since she entered college, and Berta has been almost as bad as I. Robbie Belle is the best one among us, but she does not realize it. That is the reason why she is such a dear. She never preaches—that is, never unless it is her plain duty as at that time in the north tower, when we were freshmen, you remember. If she disapproves of any of our schemes, she simply says she doesn't want to do it. That was what she said when the rest of us proposed to masquerade as a gang of wardheelers on election day.

You know what wardheelers are, I suppose. They are politicians who hang around the polls and watch the voting and see that people vote for the right party, or the wrong party, for the matter of that. It all depends on which side they belong. When they notice anybody going to vote for the other side, they sort of intimidate him, tell him to get away, or else push him out of line or punch him in the head or something like that. Sometimes they stuff the ballot-boxes, too, or go from one poll to another, voting over and over.

Now Robbie Belle had joined in with all the other fun that autumn. There were imitation rallies and parades and receptions to candidates and mock banquets with real speeches and fudges and crackers to eat. She made a perfectly splendid presidential candidate at one of the meetings. She looked ever so much like him too as she sat gravely on the platform with her hair parted on one side, and a borrowed silk hat clasped to the bosom of her brother's dress suit. When all at once her face crinkled in a sudden irresistible smile, even the seniors said she was dear. But this time she said she'd rather not be a wardheeler. She wouldn't come to a banquet of the gang the night before election day either. She said she guessed she didn't want to.

Berta and Lila and I collected butter and sugar and milk at the dinner table that evening. In our dormitory we are allowed to carry away bread and milk to our rooms, but we are not supposed to take sugar or butter for fudges. That seemed awfully stingy to us then; for in the pantry there were barrels of sugar, great cans of milk, hundreds and thousands of little yellow butterballs piled on big platters. We thought it wouldn't do any harm to use a tiny bit of it all for our banquet.

At dinner I slid two butterballs into my glass of milk, and Lila filled her glass with sugar from the bowl and then poured enough milk over it to hide the grainy look. Robbie Belle kept her eyes in another direction, but Berta said we had a right to one of the balls anyhow, because she had not eaten butter all day. Berta is the brightest girl in the class and she can argue about everything, and let the other person choose her side of the question first too. It was not until later that she reformed from that tendency to juggle with her intellect, as Prexie calls it.

Well, Lila and I marched down the long dining-room, past the seniors and the faculty table, with our glasses held up in plain sight. As soon as we reached the corridor in unmolested safety, Lila gave a skip so joyous that some drops spattered on the floor.

She said, "Nobody caught us that time."

"Hush!" I jogged her elbow so that unluckily more milk splashed on the rubber matting, "there's Martha."

Martha, you know—or probably you don't know until I tell you—was a freshman who roomed with Lila and me that year. She was the dearest little conscientious child with big eyes that were always staring at us solemnly and giving me the shivers. She appeared to think so much more than she spoke that we respected her a lot and tried to set her a good example.

Martha was waiting for the elevator. She turned around and gazed at us without saying a word. She is considerably like Robbie Belle in her exasperating power of silence, but neither of them does it on purpose.

Unfortunately just then a senior behind her turned around too and said, "Nobody catches anybody here. This is a college, not a boarding school."

Now such a remark as that was distinctly unkind, not so much because either Lila or I had ever been to a boarding school, for we hadn't, as because we wished we had. We had devoured all the stories about them and envied the girls in them. We had hoped that we would find some of the same kind of fun at college itself.

Lila blushed, and I could not think of any repartee that would be appropriate, especially as Martha was staring so hard at the glass of sugar. I had noticed all the fall that she was an odd child about candy. She never would touch a mouthful of any that we made—and we made it pretty often—maybe four times a week. She always just shook her head and said she'd rather not.

It was a relief to hear the elevator come rattling up from the first floor. The dining-room is on the second, you see, though I don't know that this fact has any bearing on the story; still it may supply local color or realism or something like that. Well, we entered the elevator, and there stood a junior in the corner. This junior chanced to be an editor of the college magazine which had offered a ten dollar prize for the best short story handed in before October twentieth. She glanced at us and then stared hard at Martha till we had passed the third floor, and at the fourth she walked out behind us and spoke to Martha. She said, "Miss Reed, I think I am not premature in congratulating you upon the story which you submitted in the contest. You will receive official notice of your victory before very long." And then she smiled the nicest sweetest smile at sight of Martha's face. It was like a burst of sunshine—anybody would have smiled. I hugged her—Martha, not the junior, because I am not well acquainted with her, you understand—but I wanted to hug everybody. Lila squeezed Martha so hard that she squeaked out loud.

"Oh," sighed the little freshman almost to herself, "now I can send mother a birthday present."

Wasn't that dear of her to think of giving it away first thing! Of course some girls would have thought of having a spread to celebrate and invite in all the crowd; but Martha was only a freshman and probably had no college spirit as yet. Her remark seemed to remind Lila of something, for she quite jumped and exclaimed, "Why, you baby, I had forgotten all about that two dollars and seventy-five cents I borrowed of you last month. And here it is only the sixth of November, but my allowance is nearly gone. Why didn't you poke up my memory?"

"And I owe her ninety cents," said I.

The little freshman walked on with her hands clasped high up over her necktie. "Will they give me the prize soon?" she asked softly, "because the birthday is Thursday, and to-day is Monday, and it takes two days to get there."

Lila looked at me and I looked at Lila. "We can scrape it together somehow," she said. Then she touched Martha on the shoulder. "Do you want to buy it to-morrow?" she inquired, "because if you do, you shall. We'll manage it somehow. We'll pay you what we owe, and then you can buy a present even if the prize doesn't arrive in time."

"Oh, thank you!" It was strange to see how voluble happiness was making the child. "Will you really? I've wanted and wanted, but I couldn't ask. I've got an engagement down town to try on my gymnasium suit to-morrow afternoon and I shall be so glad. I can mail it then."

"All right," said I, "we'll get it for you."

Then we forgot all about it till noon the next day. That was election day and full of excitement, even if we hadn't been late to breakfast, because the fudges kept us awake the night before. Martha had gone into her room early to study. Though she had closed the door I am afraid the girls made a lot of noise; and she woke up with a headache. Of course Berta and I and the others had a right to cut late if we wanted to do so, but we didn't mean to keep anybody from working.

Martha returned from breakfast just as I was catching together a tiny hole in my stocking above the shoe. It wasn't really my stocking, for I had lost mine by sending them unmarked to the laundry, and so I had borrowed these from Martha. They were her finest best ones, I believe, and very nice, though her clothes generally seemed shabby. This morning she told us to hurry down please, because the maid was feeling miserable. We did hurry and tried not to complain of the cold cocoa or the tough steak, though it is certainly the maid's duty to get fresh hot things no matter how late the girls are. She couldn't find our favorite crescent rolls in the pantry or down-stairs in the bakery or anywhere. Before we were through eating, the other maids had cleared away their breakfast dishes and had their tables all set for luncheon. Our maid was naturally slow, I suspect.

After breakfast we had barely time to smooth the counterpanes over sheets and blankets that lay in wrinkles. They looked pretty well on top, but honestly I was relieved to have Martha and her big eyes out of the way. Though we snatched our books and ran through the corridors we were two minutes tardy in reaching the Latin room. The instructor was so irritable that she laid down her book and the whole class waited while Lila and I tiptoed to our seats in the middle of the last row.

With all the campaign excitement of course we had let our work get crowded out, and the other girls appeared to be in the same fix. When the most dazzling star in the class flunked on a grammatical reference, the instructor bit her lip and sent the question flying up one row and down another as fast as the students could shake their heads. As it came leaping nearer and nearer to us, Lila remembered a college story about a girl sliding from her place and kneeling behind the seat in front till the question had passed on over the vacant spot. Lila was so agitated that she forgot how conspicuous we had been in entering late. She slipped out of her seat and hid like the girl in the story. Then fell an awful stillness. The question stopped right there, hovering over the empty place. Everybody waited. The instructor set her mouth in grimmer lines, and waited, her eyes glued to the spot from where Lila had vanished. Those in front turned around to look. Lila knelt there waiting and waiting for the question to be passed on to me. I shook my head as vigorously as I dared, but nobody paid any attention. Lila waited and waited; the instructor waited; everybody waited and waited, till Lila's knees ached so that she lifted her face and peeked. She peeked straight into those grim waiting eyes on the platform.

Then the instructor said, "Miss Allan?" with the usual dreadful interrogative inflection, and Lila shook her head. She slid back into her seat with her cheeks as red as fire.

The minute we escaped into the hall at the end of the recitation, the girls gathered around us and giggled and teased Lila till she almost broke down and cried before them all. There is a lot of difference between playing jokes on another person and appearing ridiculous yourself. The first few weeks of the year we had teased Martha by telling her it was etiquette for freshmen to rise when addressed by sophomores and stuff like that. The little thing was so unsophisticated that we made up yards and yards of stories about the dangers of going walking alone or being out after dusk. One student really did have her purse snatched last year, and a senior saw a masked robber in the pines, and once a maid caught a glimpse of a face outside her window, and actually one evening six of us beheld with our own eyes a man jump through the hedge.

On this particular morning I had no time to waste, for my tutor in mathematics had warned me that she intended to charge me for the hour for which I had engaged her, no matter whether I arrived on the scene or not. That struck me as queer and rather mean, because on some days I did not feel like going, and I failed to see why I should pay her for tutoring that I had not received. She said that her time was valuable and an hour squandered in waiting for a delinquent pupil was so much loss. I guess it was a loss to me too.

While I was flying around, trying to find my notes and pen, I heard a gulp and a sob from Martha's bedroom, and popped in to find her with her head buried in the pillow. The little idiot was crying because she had flunked in English.

"Oh, but English is so easy to bluff in!" I exclaimed, "almost any string of words will do if the teacher asks for a discussion of a tendency or of nature or vocabulary or poetic form or something. Didn't you make a try at some sort of an answer?"

"I said I didn't know," sobbed Martha, "and I didn't. My thoughts were all mixed up and I couldn't remember a line."

"You goosie!" I was disgusted. "If I said I didn't know at every opportunity where I could say it truthfully, how long do you think I would be allowed to stay in this institution of learning? When I don't know a fact, I use fancy. It is the greatest fun to catch a hint and elaborate it into a brilliant recitation without a jot of knowledge to back it up. It takes brains to do it. You've got to learn to bluff, and then get along without studying."

The little freshman raised her heavy eyes, all reddened about the lids. "Oh, but that isn't honest," she said.

"Not honest?" For an instant I was actually alarmed. Once when I myself was a freshman I nearly lost my faith in human nature because a senior whom I admired did something that looked dishonest. But sending valentines to yourself in order to win a prize is different from bluffing. So I said, "Nonsense!" and was just hurrying out of the door when she called in a quivery voice: "P-please, may I borrow a sheet of theme paper? Mine's all gone and I can't buy—I mean, it's due to-night."

"Help yourself," I answered, "there's a heap of it that I carried away from the last German test. Right hand drawer of the desk."

"No, no! I can't take that. Haven't you any that you bought with your own money? I'll pay it back. That paper—they gave it to you—didn't they give it to you just for the test?"

I stopped and walked over to feel of her head and tell her that she ought to see the doctor or take a nap or something. Then I gave her three sheets of the paper and told her not to be silly. I don't know whether she used it or not. At luncheon she appeared with her fingers inky and her hat on.

Berta said, "Whither, my child?"

She answered, "Down town." And then she looked at Lila with such anxious eyes that I jumped and clapped my hands together in contrition.

"Lila, we've forgotten to get that money for her!"

Martha turned her face toward me and sat gazing like a little dog. We asked all the girls at the table for contributions, but they were nearly penniless. I said, "Are you in a hurry, Martha?" And she said she had to be there at two o'clock. So we told her to hurry on, and we would get the money somewhere and meet her on the corner of Main and Market Streets at quarter past four sharp. She said, "Honest?" And I answered, "Yes, trust me. We'll be there, and I'll stand treat for soda water, if I can scrape up any extra pennies. You run along and pick out your present."

And then, do you know, in spite of all that and our promise to meet her, we forgot every bit about it till half-past four! You see, it was election day, and we were frightfully busy. After the fifth hour recitation we hurried into the ragged blue overalls that we had worn in one of the torchlight parades. Lila punched up the crown of an old felt alpine hat, and I battered my last summer's sailor till it looked disreputable enough. Then we rushed over to the gymnasium to join our gang of wardheelers.

We found the judges sitting at bare tables with their lists before them and wooden booths along the walls. And then—oh, I can't do justice to the fun we had! Some of us hung around outside and tried to scare away opposing voters by telling how the judges might make them sing scales or slide down ropes or wipe off their smiles on the carpets or chant the laundry list or write their names in ink with their noses, if they should be challenged. We actually succeeded in frightening away several timid freshmen. The rest of the gang pretended to stuff ballot-boxes and buy votes, just as we had read in the papers.

Berta, Lila and I voted while wearing our overalls. Then we dashed back to our rooms and dressed in our ordinary clothes and attempted to vote a second time. Such fun! The judges recognized us and refused to accept our ballots. Such an uproar as we raised! The other wardheelers stormed to the rescue; the lists were scattered, and the tables overturned. Of course it was only a joke, and most of us were too weak from laughing to clear away the disorder in time for the polls to close promptly.

And then we happened to remember Martha.

There it was half-past four and it would certainly be five before we could get ready and catch the car and reach the corner of Main and Market. So we let it go and decided that she would be tired of waiting by that time and start for home, and we might most likely miss her anyhow, even if we should collect the money and try to keep the engagement. And besides that we were having such a picnic telling about the turmoil at the polls that we hated to waste a minute away from the scene. Berta had a splendid idea about dressing up as policemen and borrowing the express wagon belonging to the janitor's grandson, and then tearing over to the gym as if we had been summoned to arrest the hoodlums and take them to jail in the patrol. It was so late, however, that we had to give this plan up and get ready for dinner. It was a dreadful disappointment.

Martha hadn't come yet. It was half-past five and dark, and then it was quarter of six, and then it was six, and we went down to dinner, but she hadn't come yet. And then it was half-past six, and we went down the avenue to the Lodge to watch the car unload, but no Martha. We danced in parlor J for a while, and then we went to chapel at seven, but she hadn't come yet. And then we walked down to the Lodge again and watched three cars stop and turn around the curve, one after another, but she wasn't in any of them. And then we went back to tell Mrs. Howard, the lady principal, about it. And she was awfully anxious and asked all sorts of questions about Martha, and what kind of a girl she was, and if she had any money with her, or any friends in town, or any peculiar habits about running away from her friends, or any trouble lately or anything.

Then she began to telephone and went to see Prexie, and Lila and I wandered out to the stairs above the bulletin board where the students were waiting to hear the election returns. Between the successive telegrams the girls clapped and laughed and stamped and hissed at speeches by the seniors and juniors, or else they sang patriotic songs.

When Miss Benton, president of the Students' Association, the greatest honor in the college course, and she is the finest senior in the class too—was urged upon a chair to make a speech, Lila almost pushed me through the banisters in her excitement. She has admired Miss Benton ever since the first day when it rained, and we were so terribly homesick, and she smiled at us in the corridor.

"Hush!" whispered Lila, "listen! Isn't she beautiful!"

"Ouch!" said I, "she isn't beautiful, she's downright plain with her hair smoothed back that way." But I said it pretty low, because that staircase banked with girls was no place for distinctly enunciated personalities. It was a humorous speech, for one reason of Miss Benton's popularity is her fun under a dignified manner. In the middle of the cheering after she had finished, the messenger girl appeared with a new bulletin. Somebody read it aloud so that we could all hear. It reported the victory of the corrupt party machine in an important city. Nobody spoke. There was just the faint sound of a big sighing oh-h-h! and then a hush.

The next thing I knew, Miss Benton and some other seniors were coming up the stairs, and the girls were moving this way and that to open a path for them. Lila crowded closer to me so as to make way. A junior on the step below reached up her hand and stopped Miss Benton as she was passing.

"Do wait for the next telegram, Mary," she said, "perhaps that will be more encouraging. The country as a whole seems to be going right."

Miss Benton dropped down beside her with an awfully discouraged sort of a sigh. "You don't live there, and I do," she said. "You do not know how the reform party has worked with soul and strength to defeat that boss. Something is terribly wrong with the citizens and their standards of honesty. How could they? How could they?"

The junior bent nearer to speak in lower tones; but Lila and I could not help hearing. "Mary, something is wrong with us too," she whispered. "Did you know that to-day at our mock election some of the sophomores pretended to be corrupt voters and wardheelers? They intimidated voters, challenged registrations, played at buying votes, tried to stuff the ballot-boxes. There was a most disgraceful scrimmage! To turn such crimes into a joke! How could they? How could we?"

Miss Benton straightened herself with a movement that was sorrowful and angry and discouraged all at once. She drew a deep breath.

"I will tell you what is wrong with us as well as with the entire country. Our ideal of honesty is wrong. With us here at college the trouble is in little things; with the world of business and politics the evil is in great matters too. But the principle is the same. We are not honest. We condemn graft in public office. Is it not also graft when a student helps herself to examination foolscap and takes it for private use? Is the girl who carries away sugar from the table any better than the government employee who misappropriates funds or supplies in his charge? We cry out in horror at revelations of bribery. Ah, but in our class elections do we vote for the candidate who will best fill the office, or for our friends? I have known a girl who desired to be president of the Athletic Association to bargain away her influence to another who was running for an editorship."

"And some of us travel on passes which are made out in other names."

Miss Benton did not hear. "We exclaim—we point our fingers—we groan over the trickery of officials, scandals, bribery, treachery, lawlessness. And yet we—is it honest to bluff in recitations—to lay claim to knowledge which we do not possess? Is it honest to injure a library book and not pay for the damage? Is it honest to neglect to return borrowed property? Some of us rob the maids of strength by obliging them to work overtime in waiting on us at the table. Our lack of punctuality steals valuable time from tutors and teachers and each other. We cheat the faculty by slighting our opportunities and thus making their life work of inferior quality to that which they have a right to expect. By heedless exaggeration we may murder a reputation—mutilate an existence. We wrong each other by being less than our best. We are unscrupulous about breaking promises. Down town this afternoon at the corner of Main and Market Streets I saw a freshman waiting in the cold. She was walking to and fro to get warm. Her teeth chattered,—she was crying from nervous suspense. When I spoke to her and advised her to return to college before dark, she shook her head, and said no, somebody had promised to meet her, and she had to stay. Now that girl, whoever it was, who broke that engagement, is responsible——"

I leaned forward and clutched Miss Benton's shoulder.

"She hasn't come back yet," I cried; "do you think she is there still? I forgot—I thought it didn't matter. I didn't mean to—"

Miss Benton turned around her head to look up at me, and the others near us looked too, and down at the foot of the stairs the crowd packed in front of the bulletin board sort of quieted for a minute and seemed to be listening and watching us. And up on the wall over their heads the big clock went tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and its long pendulum swung to and fro.

Then swish, swish, swish, the lady principal came hurrying through the reception hall beyond, with her silk skirts rustling, and her face quite pale. And the girls turned their heads toward her. She raised her hand and said in her soft voice: "Are Miss Martha Reed's roommates here?"

And then some more girls with their hats and coats on came running up the steps from the vestibule. The crowd was buzzing like everything when Lila and I pushed our way through to tell Mrs. Howard we were there. We caught scraps of sentences flying hither and thither.

"Run over?"

"Lying in the road——"

"Who found her?"

"Yes, right there in the loneliest part."

"Such a timid little thing——"

"Frightened and fell maybe——"

"Queer she didn't take the car."

"Is she dead?"

Lila pushed ahead, thrusting the girls right and left from her path. I couldn't see her face, but her shoulders kept pumping up and down as if she were smothering. You know she's more sensitive than I am, and I felt badly enough.

Mrs. Howard took her hand and said, "Miss Reed wishes to see you both and leave a message."

Of course such a speech would make anybody think she was dying. I rubbed my sleeve across my eyes and shut my teeth together and swallowed once, for the other girls around were gazing after us. Lila walked on with her head up. I couldn't see anything but the line of her cheek, and that looked sort of cold and stony. We followed on over the thick rugs into the second reception room. There sitting in a big chair, leaning back against a cushion kind of limp and pale but not dead at all—there was Martha.

"Did you get the money?" she asked.

Lila didn't answer. She just dropped on her knees and hid her face against Martha's dress.

"It was a centerpiece I thought Mother would like. I chose it in the shop-window there at the corner while I was waiting. Maybe it will get there almost in time if it is mailed to-morrow, but the doctor says I must go to the infirmary for a day or two. If you would please send it away for me in the morning—if you have the money to buy it, Lila,—I'm sorry."

The doctor walked in alert and brusque as usual but gentle too.

"Now for my captive," she said, "time's up. Life in a study with two sophomores is hard on a freshman's nerves. A few days of the rest-cure will about suit you."

Martha glanced at me, for Lila was still hiding her face.

"It was silly of me," she explained shyly, "but I grew so nervous when you didn't meet me that I cried and that made it worse. I watched every car and both sides of the street, and I waited till after dark. You see, I didn't have any money for car-fare. After they began to light the lamps, I started to walk out here to the college. Everybody was eating supper, and I was all alone on the road with dark fields on both sides. I could not help thinking of those dreadful robbers and maniacs and tramps——"

"What?" cried the doctor.

I drew a deep breath. "We told her," I said. "I—I'm afraid we exaggerated. I—I thought it would be more interesting."

"Oh!" said the doctor. It was such a grim sort of an oh that I repented some more, though indeed it was not necessary.

Martha smiled at me. I always did consider her the dearest, most sympathetic little thing. "It was my fault," she said, "I am such a coward anyhow. And then when I ran past a rock, I imagined I saw something move and jump toward me. I lost my wits and ran and ran and ran till I twisted my ankle and fell. I must have struck my head on a stone. I'm sorry. It was silly of me to run. Please don't worry."

"That will do for the present," said the doctor.

Then they carried her over to the infirmary. Lila and I walked out past the crowd in front of the bulletin board. They were cheering.

"Listen, Lila," I said, "good news from somewhere."

"We promised to meet her," said Lila.

I hate regrets. "Well," I said, "that's all over and done with. There is no use in bothering about it now. But the next promise we make——"

Berta rushed up to us. "Oh, girls!" she exclaimed, "did you catch that last return? Reform is sweeping the country. Hurrah!"



CHAPTER VII

FOUR SOPHOMORES AND A DOG

The last recitation of the winter term was over, and the corridors were alive with girls hurrying this way and that, pinning on their hats, buttoning jackets, crowding into the elevator, unfurling umbrellas, and chattering all the time.

"Hope you'll have the nicest sort of a time!" "Don't stay up too late!" "Good-bye!" "Oh, good-bye!" "Be sure to get well rested this vacation!" "Awfully, awfully sorry you wouldn't come home with me, Gertrude, you bad child! But I know you won't suffer from monotony with Berta and Beatrice in the same study." "Hurry, girls, there's the car now. Just hear that bell jingle, will you!" "Good-bye, Gertrude, and don't let Sara work too hard!" "Oh, good-bye!"

Gertrude felt the clutch of arms relax from about her neck, and managed to breathe again. This was one of the penalties—pleasant enough, doubtless, if a person were in the mood for it—of being a popular sophomore. For a minute she lingered wearily in the vestibule to watch the figures flying down the avenue to the Lodge gates. How their skirts fluttered and twisted around them, and how their hats danced! Their suit-cases bounded and bumped as they ran, and their umbrellas churned up and down in choppy billows before the boisterous March wind. There! the last one had vanished in a whirl of flapping ends and lively angles beyond the dripping evergreens.

As she was turning languidly away, a backward glance espied two girls emerging from one of the dormitories far across the flooded lawn. They came skipping over the narrow planks that had been laid in the rivers flowing along the curving walks. The first was Berta swathed in a hooded waterproof; and the second, of course, was Beatrice, a tam flung askew on her red curls, her arms thrust through a coat sleeve or two, a laundry bag swinging from one elbow, and a tin fudge pan clasped tenderly and firmly beneath the other, while with the hands so providentially left free she stooped at every third step to rescue one or the other of her easy-fitting rubbers from setting out on a watery voyage all by itself.

"Hi!" she gasped after a final shuffling dash, as she caught sight of immaculate Gertrude, "I wore your overshoes. Hope you don't mind. They're not very wet inside, and I brought over your things so that we can move into our borrowed study right off now."

"Where are my things?" asked Gertrude with natural curiosity and perhaps unnatural calm.

"Here," jerking the laundry bag, "it holds a lot—brushes, soap, nightgown, toothpowder, fountain-pen, note-book, everything. Berta carried your mending basket. You needn't bother one bit."

"I'll run back and forth for anything you want," volunteered Berta hastily at sight of an irritable frown on the usually serene brow of handsome Gertrude.

"You're cross!" commented Bea with a cheerful vivacity that was exasperating to the highest degree, considering that everybody ought to be worn down to an unobtrusive state of limp inertia after the three busy months just concluded, "you've been cross ever since Sara——"

"Berta, lend me your gossamer and rubbers, please," when Gertrude was unreasonably provoked she had a habit of snapping out her words even more clear-cut than usual. An instant later she swept forth into the rain only to stop short and hurry in again before the door had swung shut. "We might as well look at the study first," she said in a more gracious tone, "and we can draw lots to see who is to have the inside bedroom. I dare say the change to this building will be a rest."

Berta took quick survey from the window to explore the cause for this amazing wavering of purpose.

"Ah!" she murmured in swift enlightenment, "it's Sara. She's coming over the path."

A peculiar expression flitted across Bea's ingenuous face—an expression half quizzical, half sorry. "Then we'd better follow Gertrude's example, and clear the track. She'll cut us dead again—that meek little mouse of a girl! And I don't blame her for it either, so there!"

Berta tucked a pensive skip in between steps as they moved through the gloomy corridor past rain-beaten windows. "It wasn't like Gertrude to burst out like that just because Sara came late to our domestic evening, but it did spoil the fudges and the game and everything."

"And not to give her a chance to explain!" fumed Bea's temper always ready to flame over any injustice. "Before she could open her lips, Gertrude blazed up, cold as an icicle——"

"What?" interpolated demure Berta with her most deeply shocked accent, "an icicle blaze?"

"Oh, hush, you're the most disagreeable person! I wish Lila hadn't gone home. Well, she did just that. She said the artistic temperament was no excuse for discourteous falsehood—or she almost the same as said it—meaning breaking your word, you know, for Sara had promised she would come at eight, and there it was quarter to nine. She said that it might be wiser next time to invite somebody more reliable about keeping engagements. Sara did not answer a word—only went white as a sheet and walked out of the room. Now she even cuts us—because we were there—stares right over our heads when we meet her anywhere."

"I'm sure Gertrude was sorry the minute she had spoken. And she's been working awfully hard over committees and the maids' classes and the last play. She was tired and nervous up to the brim, and then to wait and wait and wait for Sara. Why, I was getting cross myself."

"Well, why doesn't she beg Sara's pardon then, and make it all right?" demanded the young judge severely. "Sara has always simply worshiped her, but because she never has made mistakes nor learned how to apologize, and everybody admires her and flatters her, she is too proud to say she was wrong. It's plain vanity—that's what it is. She can't bear to make herself do it."

"She's unhappy,—that's what I think, though she sort of pretends she doesn't care."

"She's cross as a bear—that's what I think," snapped Bea, "and Sarah has dark circles under her eyes. It's dreadful—those two girls who used to be inseparable! Quarrels are—are horrible!" The impetus of this conviction almost succeeded in hurling its proprietor against the water cooler at the bathroom door. "Say, Berta, what if you and I should quarrel, with Robbie Belle and Lila one thousand miles away?"

"I'm too amiable," responded Berta complacently, "sugar is sweet——"

The tin cup dropped with a flurried rattle against the fudge pan. "Oh!" a shriek of dismay, "my dear young and giddy friend, we're all out of sugar. What if we should want to make anything to-night? Let's run back to the grocery by the kitchen this minute."

Owing to this delay, Gertrude had been in the study for more than ten minutes, staring out at the trees writhing in the wind, when she was startled by the sound of a suffocated shriek, followed by a scamper of four thick-soled shoes, the heels smiting the corridor floor with disgracefully mannish force. The door flew inward vehemently, and Bea shot clear across the room to collapse in the farthest corner, hiding her face in the fudge pan while her shoulders quivered and heaved terrifyingly. Berta walked in behind her, and after one reproachful look, sat down carefully in a rocker and brushed her scarlet face before beginning to giggle helplessly.

"You're the meanest person! Beatrice Leigh, you knew I was turning into the wrong alleyway, but you never said a word. You wanted to see me disgraced. The door opened like magic, and there she stood as if she had slid through the keyhole. She stood there plastered against the wall and—and—regarded us——"

"Oh!" moaned Bea in ecstasy, one fiery ear and half a cheek emerging from the kindly shelter of the fudge pan, "she glared. She wondered why those two idiotic individuals were stalking toward her without a word or knock or smile, when suddenly the hinder one exploded and vanished, while the other ignominiously—stark, mute, inglorious—fled, ran, withdrew—so to speak——"

"Why didn't you say something?" groaned Berta. "I simply lost my wits from the surprise. She was the very last person I expected to see anywhere around here. How in the world did she happen to borrow the next room to ours? She'll think we were making fun of her—that we did it on purpose. She's awfully sensitive anyhow!"

"Well, you two are silly!" commented Gertrude, her face again toward the driving storm. "Who was it? Not a senior, I hope, or a faculty?"

Bea straightened herself abruptly, the laughter driven sternly out of every muscle except one little twitching dimple at the corner of her mouth. "It was Sara," she exclaimed, "and she is pale as a ghost. She has never been so strong since waking up on that boat and finding a burglar trying to steal the ring off her finger during the holidays. You know how she jumps at every sudden noise, and she's been getting thinner and thinner, and I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself clear down to the ground." Here the dimple vanished in earnest. "I know I'm ashamed of myself, and so's Berta. Even her lips were white. Now we've hurt her feelings worse. I didn't think. Nice big splendid excuse for a sophomore, isn't it?"

"There's the gong for luncheon," was Gertrude's only reply as she moved toward the door.

Bea's flare of denunciation had subsided quickly in her characteristic manner. She sat absently nibbling the handle of the obliging pan, while staring after the receding figure, its girlish slenderness stiffened as if to warn away all friendliness. "She's stubborner than ever. I say, Berta, let's reconcile them."

"Oh, let's!" in echoing enthusiasm, adding as the beauty of the plan glowed brighter, "they'll probably thank us to the last day that they live. I know I would, if it were Robbie and I who were drifting farther and farther apart."

"Very likely," responded the arch-conspirator, beginning at the lower edge of the tin doubtless itself delicious from long association with dainties, "but the question is: How are we going to do it? One is proud, and the other is proud too. I don't see exactly how we can fix it."

As Berta did not see either, they decided with considerable sound sense meanwhile to go to luncheon. The next day after many minutes of discouraging meditation mingled with a few hours of tennis in the gymnasium, an idea came to them. While they rested on the window ledge, watching Gertrude stroll to and fro in the sunshine balmy at last, Bea began to waste her breath as usual.

"'To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow drags out its weary course from day to day,'" she quoted with mindless cheerfulness, only to interrupt herself good naturedly, "say, Berta, do you realize that the third to-morrow aforementioned is April Fool's Day? I wish something interesting would happen. This is the most monotonous place in vacation."

"To-morrow never is, it always will be," corrected the carping critic.

Bea with indifference born of long endurance paid no attention. "I say!" rapturously as the idea began to dawn upon her inward vision, "let's reconcile them with a joke."

"All right," agreed her partner with most charming alacrity, "what joke?"

The question was rather a poser, as Bea was inclined to take only one step at a time and utter one thought as it obligingly arrived, without anxiety about the next. This tendency had occasionally landed her high and dry on the shores of nothingness in the classroom.

"Oh, um-m-m, I haven't determined that point yet. It isn't only great minds that move slowly." Gertrude's cape swung into view at the turn of the walk. "Berta, she looks awfully lonesome, doesn't she?"

"Well," argued the other, "nobody can expect us to do all the tagging around ourselves, especially where a contemporary is concerned. If she wants us to walk with her, she might omit a few snubs now and then. I'm tired of chasing after her."

"The trouble is that you are not a faithful friend, faithful friend," rattled Bea, "man's faithful friend, the dog. Oh, oh, oh, Berta, I have an idea!"

"Noble girl!" Berta patted her on the head. "I generously refrain from comment."

"Thank you, sweetheart. I feared you could not deny yourself that remark about keeping my idea, as I might never get another. But this one is an idea about a dog. Let's find a puppy to give Gertrude for a soothing companion this vacation. I love puppies."

"The question is: does Gertrude also love puppies? Or is it a joke?"

"Let's get a dog and surprise her with it April Fool's morning. He will be such a friendly little fellow and so faithful that her conscience will sting her——"

"I must acknowledge that you are a humane, tender-hearted individual. To plot a stinging conscience——"

"Oh, hush, Berta! Do be nice and agreeable. I'm awfully tired this week, and I really need some distraction. The corridors stretch out empty and silent, and breakfast doesn't taste good at all, and—and I want to do something for Sara."

"Oh, all right!" Berta spied the glint of an excitable tear and shrugged the weight of common sense from her shoulders. "I'm with you."

Three days passed—three days of blue sky and fluffy clouds and air that sent Bea dancing from end to end of the long stone wall while Berta stumped conceitedly along the path in her new rubber boots. Gertrude wondered aloud why two presumably intelligent young women insisted upon spending every morning in foolish journeys over muddy country roads. Noting an unaccustomed accent of peevishness in the energetic voice, Berta began to worry a bit over the likelihood that such petulance was due to impending sickness. Bea jeered at this, though with covert side glances to detect any signs of fever. In her secret soul, where she hid the notions which she dimly felt looked best in the dark, she reflected that an attack of some mild disease might be a valuable form of retribution, and also afford the invalid leisure to repent of her sins. Still she did not quite like to mention this thought aloud, as it seemed too unkindly vengeful with regard to any one so obviously miserable as Gertrude.

One day on charitable plans intent the two conspirators dragged Gertrude out across the brown fields to have fun building a bonfire, as they had done the previous spring. But somehow the expedition was not much of a success—possibly because the wood was too damp to burn inspiritingly. On that other occasion Sara had been with them, and had kept them laughing. She could say the funniest things without stirring a muscle of her small solemn face. That stump speech of hers given from a genuine stump had sent them actually reeling home. This year—alas!—while returning to college rather silently, they saw Sara plodding toward them with an air of being out for sober exercise, not pleasure. The moment she spied them, she deliberately retraced her steps, and vanished through a hole in the hedge. This incident set Gertrude to chattering so excitedly about nothing in particular that the others knew she cared even more than they had fancied.

On the evening of the last day of March, Bea and Berta came rushing into the dining-room twenty minutes late for dinner. When they both declared that they did not want any soup—their favorite kind, too—Gertrude sighed impatiently over countermanding her order to the maid. It seemed as if she were not getting rested one bit this vacation, though she did nothing but read novels all day long. She felt sometimes as if she were hurrying every minute to escape from herself and her own thoughts. Everything irritated her in the strangest way. In all her busy healthful life she had never been nervous before. It was not hard work that had worn upon her. The doctor told them when they were freshmen that no girl ever broke down from work unless worry was added. Gertrude knew perfectly well what torturing little worry was gnawing away in her mind. She kept telling herself that her speech to Sara had been true—it was so—Sara had broken her engagement—and she could not, could not, could not humble herself to apologize. In fact, Sara was the one who ought to offer apologies. And all this time wilful Gertrude refused to acknowledge even to herself that she was juggling with her conscience in the desperate determination to hold herself free from blame in her own esteem. She simply could not beg anybody's pardon, and she was not going to do it, because—well, because she had not been to blame—so there!

On this particular evening, after five solid minutes of silence on the part of her exasperating roommates, she raised her heavy eyes, and let them rest expressionlessly on the two wind-freshened faces, till Bea's roses blossomed to her hair.

"We're not doing anything," rebelliously, "you are so boss-y."

"Moo-oo," muttered Berta to her plate. "Bow-wow-wow." Bea choked over her glass and fled precipitately, leaving her partner to capture a pitcher of milk ostensibly to drink before going to bed.

Of course they would have regretted missing dessert as well as soup, if Gertrude had not asked permission to carry some of the whipped cream to her room. It was easier to do something unnecessarily generous than to beg Sara's pardon—which was merely plain hard duty. The girls were not in the study when she entered with her offering, but soon Bea dashed in and dropped breathlessly on the couch, with a conspicuous effort to act as if accustomed to arrive without her present double. Gertrude listened unsuspiciously to the flurried explanation that Berta was kept by a—a—a—friend, before she revealed the brimming trophy from dessert.

Bea clapped her hands. "Oh, you darling! the very thing! Won't that pup"—an abrupt and convulsive cough subsided brilliantly into, "that pet of a Berta be pleased! I'll take it to her this instant."

However, she did not invite Gertrude to accompany her, and upon her return after a prolonged absence, she conducted herself with odd restlessness. In the intervals of suggesting that they put up an engaged sign or read aloud or darn stockings or play patience before going to a certain spread, she stared at the clock. Promptly at eight she escaped from the door, near which she had been lingering for the past quarter-hour, with the carefully distinct announcement that she was going after Berta, and later she might attend the spread.

Five minutes later she was bending over a fluffy little creature nestling on Gertrude's best pillow in one of the partitioned off bathrooms at the end of the corridor.

"He's been pretty good," said Berta as she surrendered the spoon, "and he likes the cream, only the bubbles in it keep him awake, I think. Somebody hammered at the door so long that I had to stuff a lot into his mouth every time he started to cry."

Bea assumed her station of nurse with businesslike briskness. "Hurry back to Gertrude, and coax her to go to that spread if you can. She's terribly blue to-night. Be sure to get back here at nine, and I will take my turn at the party so that nobody will be too curious about this affair. At ten we shall both be here to decide about the night."

"Then we can hook the door on the inside, and climb over the partition. Won't it be fun! I wonder if I shouldn't better practice doing it now," and Berta looked longingly at the black walnut precipice.

"You trot along this instant, and don't let Gertrude suspect anything for the world. Be just as natural as you know how—more than ever before in your life. I reckon I shall put him to sleep in a jiffy."

"Try it," called the ex-nurse with laconic scorn, "I'll allow you the full hour for the experiment."

It must have been a very full hour indeed, to judge from Bea's feelings as the minutes dawdled past. It seemed to her that instead of flying with their sixty wings, according to the rhyme, each minute trailed its feathers in the dust as it shuffled along. At first, it was amusing to watch for the mouth to open, and then pop in a spoonful of cream. But this soon became monotonous, especially when she learned that no matter how long she sat motionless beside the pillow, the bright little eyes blinked wide awake at her slightest stir to rise.

It was lonesome in that end of the great building. Their suite and Sara's room next to it were the only ones occupied in that neighborhood during the vacation. This bathroom was as much as forty steps distant even from that populated spot, and not a single footfall had sounded in the corridor since Berta had disappeared into the gloom. The light from the outer apartment glimmered dully over the partition. At intervals in the stillness, a drop of water clinked from the faucet out there. Bea found herself holding her breath to listen for the tinkle of its splash. Outside the small window, a pale moon was drifting among fluffy clouds.

More than once Bea rose with exquisite caution, and stole to the outer door, only to hear a plaintive whine, while four clumsy paws came pattering after her. Then followed more minutes of soothing him with cream, and watching for the little woolly sides to cease heaving so piteously. Perhaps after all it would have been wiser to have left this troublesome joke with his mother on the farm.

By the time this vague suggestion had wavered into her consciousness, the strain of waiting and listening began to re-act on her temper. Of course, Berta had forgotten all about her watching there alone in the dark. Berta was selfish and thoughtless and heedless. That very afternoon, while they were bringing the puppy to college, she had almost tipped the buggy over into a puddle. Berta had no right to impose upon her like this, and make her do the worst part of the work every time. Why, even when they went calling together, Bea always had to do the knocking and walk in first and manage the conversation and everything. And now Berta was having fun at the spread, and it must be near ten o'clock, for the watchman had already shuffled softly past and turned the gas still lower. And she knew her foot was going to sleep, and she could never feel the same toward Berta Abbott again.

Bea was so sorry for herself that her lip began to quiver over a sobbing breath, when steps came hurrying helter-skelter, the door banged open, and Berta dived in.

"Oh, Bea, I'm dreadfully sorry! I couldn't get away before. They held me—actually—and made me jig for them, and sing that last song I wrote. The preserved ginger was so delicious that I saved some for you. Nobody suspects a thing. How is the little dear?"

Bea rose with impressive dignity till the straightening of numb muscles inspired an agonized, "Ouch!" and a stiff wriggle. It was every bit Berta's fault, and she evidently didn't care a snap. She would show people whether they could walk all over her and never say boo! She would not lose her temper—oh, no! she would not utter a word—not a single one of all the scorching things she could think of. She would just be dignified and self-possessed and teach certain persons that she did not intend to be imposed upon one instant longer. Therefore, Miss Beatrice Leigh flung open the door and stalked away without a backward glance.

"Hulloa!" ejaculated Berta, staring blankly after her, "what's your rush?"

No answer; merely a somewhat more defiant swing of the slender shoulders vanishing in the dusk of the deserted corridor.

"What shall we do with the dog? You borrowed him—you're responsible—it's your idea," following in a puzzled flurry as far as the threshold. "Shall I lock him in alone? I said all along it was silly."

Those insolent shoulders sailed silently around the transverse and out of sight.

After a petrified moment, Berta drew a deep breath, and threw back her head while the crimson of quick resentment flamed from neck to hair. That was a nice way to be treated, when she had simply done her best not to arouse suspicion, exactly as Bea had warned her. She took two steps hastily away from the spot; then turned slowly and glanced in at the soft heap of white showing dimly on the darker blur of the pillow. She certainly did not propose to spend the entire night in playing nurse to anybody, especially after Bea had insulted her so unpardonably. It had been Bea's idea all along too, and Berta had worked herself nearly to death to make it a success. The miles and miles she had tramped through the mud—and all to no result! Now everything was spoiled, and everybody had quarreled with everybody else. Whereupon Berta marched away to bed, leaving the swinging door unhooked and the outer door ajar. Bea was indisputably right in criticising her fellow conspirator as heedless.

At midnight Gertrude sprang from her pillow, both arms flung out into the darkness, every nerve quivering as she listened for a second scream. She had chosen the inside bedroom that had a window opening on the corridor. Now in the breathless silence, she heard a swift creak ending in the bang of an up-flung sash. A swish of light garments, a thud shaking the floor outside, and then bare feet flying in frantic haste past her room and into the alleyway.

A crash against the study door, and the knob rattled wildly. "Let me in, quick, quick! Help, Gertrude, help!"

There was a flash of white across the floor, the lock grated, and Sara was in Gertrude's arms. Portieres rustled apart, and two more apparitions loomed pallidly in the dark.

"Hulloa!" gasped Berta's voice, while a woodeny click from Bea's direction told of Indian clubs snatched bravely in readiness for war.

"Light the gas, girls," ordered Gertrude quietly; "there, dear, don't be frightened now. See, we are all here. We will take care of you. What was it startled you?"

"I don't know. It was dark. Something moved. I heard something. I was afraid."

Gertrude felt her tremble, and held her closer. Over the bowed head she spoke with her lips to the other two. "That steamboat shock."

Bea caught the idea impulsively. "Oh, Sara!" she exclaimed, "you're only nervous. You've often waked up and screamed a little ever since that night on the boat. It's nothing. Crackie! but you frightened us at first!"

Sara lifted a white face. "This was different," she said; "this was something alive. Hark!"

They leaned forward, listening. Yes, there was a footstep outside, muffled, stealthy. A board creaked. Something was breathing.

Gertrude and Berta looked at each other in quick challenge for mutual courage. All the other rooms at that end of the building were vacant; the long dark corridor stretched out its empty tunnel between them and available help. What could four girls do?

"We can scream," said Bea.

"Lock the door—and the inner window—quick!" Gertrude flew to one, Berta to the other. "Sara, take this Indian club. Now if it really is—anything, scream. But don't run. Don't scatter. Scream—scream all together. Ah!"