She had never felt an affinity with "haunts of ancient peace" like Jean and Helen. Only that week she had been reading in one of the Dean's early English histories of real rooftrees. How, in the earliest times, primitive people built their houses around some selected giant oak or other king of the forest, with the massive trunk itself upholding the structure. If she could have done so, Kit would have gladly selected for herself her own special tree in the forest primeval, rather than have fallen heir to any ancestral castle such as Helen hankered for.

So, the little town perched high on the bluff above the lake had appealed to her mightily. Although from a western standpoint it was quite old, dating at least five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, from the colonial standpoint it was a mere youngster.

"Historic tradition?" repeated Kit. "When all around here are the old Indian trails, and the footprints left by the French explorers. I just wish I could get Billie out here for a little while. He'll settle down in some old school that thinks it is wonderful because John Smith built a camp-fire on its site once upon a time, or Pocahontas planted corn in its back field."

Kit sighed, tucked her mother's and father's letters in her sweater pocket and started off for her favorite lookout point on the bluff. Here, with Sandy crouching at her feet, she read the three letters from the girls. Jean's was full of plans for her coming trip to New York, She was not going to Boston this year, but Aunt Beth had promised her three months at the Art school, and she was to take pupils besides, to help out expenses.

"You know, if the war had ended as we planned, I could have gone to Italy with Carlota and the Countess, but the villa is still used as a hospital, and though I am dying to go, Dad and mother won't hear of it. Don't I wish I were twenty so I could do some Red Cross work and get over? It seems so perfectly futile dabbling away at one's own little petty ambitions, with humanity needing one so."

That was quite like Jean, Kit thought, glancing over the rest of the letter hurriedly. Cousin Roxy had given a community social, and Mr. Howard had interested Jean considerably, especially as he told her he was bound for France the first of November. Jean was always so easily impressed just the first few times she met a person. It took Kit a long time to really admit a stranger to her circle of selected ones, and she had never quite forgiven Stanley Howard for trespassing in the berry patch, even though it had been in the cause of science. Besides, the last year, Jean had seemed to grow somewhat aloof from the others. Perhaps it had been her trips away from home, or her ambition. Kit could not precisely define the change, but it was there, and she felt that Jean troubled herself altogether too much over things unseen. One of Kit's favorite mottoes was from Stevenson:

"In things immaterial, Davey, be soople."

Helen's letter was all about the opening of school, and Doris' asked questions about Delphi.

"When you write, do tell us about the things that happen there, and not just what you think about it. I don't like descriptions in books, I like the talk part. You know what I mean, Kit. Has Uncle Cassius got any pets at all?"

Kit laughed over this. Bless her heart, if she could only have seen Uncle Cassius' pets. His stuffed mummy and horned toads, the chimpanzee skull beaming at one from a dark corner, and the Cambodian war mask from another. It seemed as if every time she looked around the house she found something new, and with each curio there went a story. Oddly enough, the Dean thawed more under Kit's persuasion when she begged for the stories than at any other time. After each meal, it was his custom to take what he called "four draws" in his study. Kit found at these times that he was in his best humor. Relaxed and thoughtful, he would lean back in the deep Morris chair between the flat-topped desk and the fireplace, and smoke leisurely. Even his pipe had come from Persia, its amber stem very slender and beautifully curved, its bowl a marvel of carving.

Kit sat pondering over her father's and mother's letters, after putting those of the two girls away. School would begin in another week, and she was to enter the sophomore preparatory, which corresponded to the second year in high school back home. And yet, after what her father had written, she felt that she was not giving the Dean a square deal.

The odor of tobacco came through the library window, and acting on the spur of the moment, she stepped around the corner of the veranda and perched herself on the window sill.

"Are you busy, Uncle Cassius?" Anybody who was well acquainted with Kit would have suspected the gentleness of her tone, but the Dean looked over at her with a little pleased smile. Her coming was almost an answer to his reverie.

"Not at all, my dear, not at all. In fact, I was just thinking of you. I am inclined to think after all that we will begin with the geological periods. I wish you to get your data assembled in your mind on prehistoric peoples before we take up any definite groups."

"That's all right," Kit answered, comfortably. "I don't mind one bit. I'll do anything you tell me to, Uncle Cassius, because," this very earnestly, "I do feel as if I hadn't played quite fair. I mean in coming out here, and landing on you suddenly, without warning you I was a girl, and I want to make up to you for it in every possible way. I'll study bones and ruins and rocks, and anything you tell me to, but I want to make sure first that you really like me. Just as I am, I mean, before you know for certain whether all this is going to 'take.'"

The Dean glanced up in a startled manner and looked at the face framed by the window quite as if he had never really given it an interested scrutiny before. Not being inclined to sentiment by nature, he had regarded Kit so far solely from the experimental standpoint. Since she had turned out to be a girl, he had decided to make the best of it, and at least try the effect of the course of instruction upon her. The personal equation had never entered into his calculation, and yet here was Kit forcing it upon him, quite as plainly as though she had said:

"Do you like me or don't you? If you don't I think I had better go back home."

"Well, bless my heart," he said, rubbing his head. "I thought that we had settled all that. Of course, my dear, the reason I preferred a boy was because, well"—the Dean floundered,—"because scientists hold a consensus of opinion that through—hem—through centuries of cultivation, I may say, collegiate development,—the male brain offers a better soil, as it were, for the—er—er——"

"The flower of genius?" suggested Kit, happily. "I don't think that's so at all, Uncle Cassius, and I'll tell you why. You take it on the farm down home. Dad says that our land in Gilead is no good because it's been worked over and over, and it's all worn out, but if you plow deep and strike a brand new subsoil you get wonderful crops. Just think what a lovely time you'll have planting crops in my unplowed brain cells."

The first laugh she had ever heard came from the Dean's lips, although it was more of a chuckle. His next question was apparently irrelevant.

"How do you think you're going to like Hope College?"

"All right," Kit responded, cheerfully. "I only hope it likes me. I've met a few of the boys and girls through Rex and Aunt Daphne, and I like them awfully well. You know, down home they're nice to you if they know who you are, and all about your family. Cousin Roxy says it's better to have a private burial lot well filled with ancestors than your name in the Social Register. But out west here it seems as if they either like you or not. Just when they first meet you, you're taken right into the fold on the strength of what you are yourself. Rex said an awfully funny thing the other day when Barty Browning declared that he had two Indian chiefs in his family, and Rex asked me if we had a little 'tommyhawk' in our family."

The door opened with a little, light, deprecating tap first from Miss Daphne's finger-tips. She glanced around the side of it cautiously to be sure she was not disturbing the Dean, and smiled whimsically when she saw the two. The Dean's pipe had gone out, and he was leaning over the desk listening as eagerly as though he had been a boy himself, while Kit, with her hands clasped behind her head, chatted. Usually people conversed with the Dean, they never chatted, and Miss Daphne realized that Kit had already passed the outposts of the Dean's defenses.



CHAPTER XI

"KEEP OUT"

Hope College was founded in 1871. This date was graven on the corner stone, which the Dean had been careful to show Kit, telling her at the same time how the first settlers through the middle Northwest followed the customs of the Puritans and Cavaliers.

"A church, a schoolhouse for every clearing, and a college before the county court-house."

It seemed queer to Kit to think of Hope College as being any kind of an historic pile, but Rex had assured her anything that dated before Custer was ancient history, and if you wanted to get almost prehistoric, you went back to Lewis and Clarke, and the Jesuit explorers.

"Why, back at Gilead," Kit told him, "even the mounting stone at Cousin Roxy's had 1721 on it."

The college was built of gray field stone covered with climbing woodbine and Virginia creeper, and it dominated the little town. There were five buildings in the campus group, the main building, laboratory, library and gymnasium, boys' dormitory, and chapel.

Kit never forgot the first morning when the classes met in Assembly Hall, and the Dean addressed them on the work and aims of the coming year. For the life of her, she could not keep her mind on all he was saying or the solemnity of the moment, because, just at the very last minute when the chapel chimes stopped ringing, Marcelle Beaubien entered through the dark green swinging doors at the back of the big, crowded hall. It seemed as though every one's eyes were watching the platform, but Kit saw the slender, silent figure standing there alone. She was dressed in black, a thin black lawn, with collar and cuffs of dark red linen, and her heavy brown hair was braided in two long plaits down her back. She waited there, it seemed to Kit, expectant on the threshold of opportunity, not knowing which way to go, and without a friendly hand extended to her in welcome or guidance.

Norma Riggs, who sat next to Kit, glanced back to see what had attracted her attention, and made a funny little deprecating sound with her mouth.

"I never thought she'd have the nerve to really do it," she whispered. "Isn't she odd?"

A quick impulsive wave of indignation swept over Kit, and she rose from her seat, passing straight down the aisle without even being aware of the curious glances which followed her. She took Marcelle by storm.

"You're in my class, aren't you?" she whispered quickly. "It's right over here, and there's a seat beside me. I don't know any one either, and I'm so glad to see you, so I'll have some one to talk to."

Marcelle never answered, but smiled with a quick flash of appreciation, the smile which always seemed to illumine her rather grave face. She followed Kit back to the latter's seat, and Norma exchanged glances with her right-hand neighbor, Amy Parker. Kit was altogether too new to realize just exactly what she had done. Being the Dean's grandniece, she considered herself unconsciously a privileged person. As a matter of course, Miss Daphne had accompanied her that morning, and introduced her to four or five girls in the sophomore "prep" class, who came from the representative best families of the town. Also, as a matter of course, she had been welcomed as one of them, but Kit, with her democratic notions, never even realized that she occupied one of the seats of the mighty, in a circle of the favored few, and that she had smashed all tradition by introducing into that circle a Beaubien. In fact, even if she had known, she would probably have been thoroughly indignant at any such spirit among the girls themselves.

Jean and Helen were the natural-born aristocrats in the family, Kit always said. They loved to feel themselves aloof and not part of the populace.

"The sedan chair and palanquin for both of you," Kit had been wont to say, scornfully, "but give me a good horse and a wide trail, or if I can't have the horse, I'll hike."

And here she loved to quote Stevenson's "Vagabond" to them.

"Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me.

"Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above, And the road below me."

The whole morning was taken up with the assigning of students to classes. Kit loved the curious bustle and excitement of it all. It was so different from the small high school back home, and there were many more boys and girls than she had expected to see. Almost, as she passed from room to room, through the different buildings, she wished she were staying right there as a year pupil. Amy introduced her to her closest friend, Peggy Barrows, a girl from South Dakota, who took them up to her quarters in one of the dormitories.

"Dear me," Kit said, looking around her speculatively. "I wish I were going to live here. Peggy, you'll have to entertain us often. It's so kind of solitary and restful, isn't it, up here?"

"Solitary," scoffed Peggy. "I've been here four days getting settled, and you might just as well call the side show of a circus solitary. There isn't even the ghost of privacy. I'm mobbed every time I try to sit and meditate."

"Who wants to meditate, anyway?" asked Amy. "Don't you feel 'the rushing torrent of ambition's flood sweeping away the barriers' and—what else did the Dean say?"

"Log jam," Kit put in. "That's what he meant, log jam of laziness. Have you discovered all these shelves in your wardrobe? I'd take off those doors and hang lovely velvety curtains in front and make a bookcase out of it."

"Will you gaze upon her Chinese tea cupboard," exclaimed Norma, standing before the high black box, with one middle shelf, and little green and gold curtains hung before the tea set. "Where did you purloin that, Peg?"

"Peter gave it to me for fifty cents. It used to be a dumb waiter, and I painted it black myself. Isn't it beautiful? Have you seen Charity's room? Wait." Peggy darted out of her door and across the hall. On the door opposite a card bore the legend in large black letters:

"KEEP OUT." "STUDY HOUR."

"That's perfectly ridiculous," she said, tapping just the same. "Nobody's studying to-day. Let us in, Charity."

A sound of scraping over the floor, and muffled giggles came to the waiting ones in the hall, then the door was thrown wide, and Kit caught her first glimpse of Charity Parks, the best loved girl at Hope. She was about seventeen, but a short, roly-poly type, with curly rumpled hair and gray eyes that never seemed to keep from mirth. There were five other girls with her, and spread over the couch, chairs, and table were writing material and papers.

"We're frightfully busy, girls," Charity said, discouragingly. "What do you want?"

"Just to look at your room. Isn't it inspiring, Kit? This is Kit Robbins, Charity."

"Hope you'll like it at Hope." Charity gave Kit her hand with a warm grip. "I'm from the east, too, only not so far as you are, but we think Pennsylvania's east, out here. How do you like the decoration?"

Kit liked it, and said so emphatically. The room was in Chinese blue and black, tea table, chiffonier and two chairs painted a dull black, and the walls tinted a soft deep gray blue.

"I hunted all over Chicago for Chinese things, and I found a few. Isn't this a celestial rose jar? I think it's big enough for a pot of basil. Who was the gentle poet that sang of the lady who buried her fond lover's head in a flower pot and watered it with her tears?"

"Bet you use it for orange punch before the year is up," Peggy laughed. "Oh, Kit, she makes wonderful fruit punch. Each guest brings her own favorite fruit, then Charity mashes them all together and it's delicious."

"I wish I stayed here all the time," Kit exclaimed. "You miss the fun, being a day student, don't you?"

"Never mind, child," Charity told her consolingly, "we will have some special daylight celebrations all for you. Now clear out, girls, because I'm dying to lay out the first edition schedule."

"Charity's editor of the 'Glamour,'" Peg said. "The boys call it the 'Clamour,' but we don't mind. It used to be the 'Gleam,' but we thought 'Glamour' carried more intensity with it. Kit's going to dash off some little simple trifle in spare moments for us, aren't you? Amy writes poetry, free verse. Show them that bit you made up in Assembly."

Amy took out a sheet of copy paper from her Ancient History, and read aloud:

"Oh, wayward maid, Hast strayed Too far from native strand. Lost in a maze, the savage gaze Becomes a frightened, spellbound gaze, By fond ambition fanned."

"Sounds just like Pope, doesn't it?" said Kit. "I like that last line, 'by fond ambition fanned.'"

"Seek not the sacred hall of fame, Cling to thy simple life, On Hope's high banner, Beaubien, Shall never, never——"

But Kit interrupted pointblank. She was sitting up very straight on the divan, with a certain expression around her mouth, and a very steady purposeful look in her eyes, which even Jean at home paid attention to.

"Just a minute," she said, quickly. "Do you mean Marcelle Beaubien? Because if you do, I don't think that's fair."



CHAPTER XII

KIT LOCATES A "FOUNDER"

Peg patted her in a conciliatory manner.

"Now, my child," she said, "curb that swift and rising wrath, and bottle the vials thereof. What is Hecuba to you, or you to Hecuba?"

"Poor little Peggy," Charity murmured, "getting into trim for a Shakespeare drive? You know, Kit, our Peg is president of the Portia Dramatic Club, and the mantle doth not rest lightly on her young shoulders."

But Kit could not be diverted, and the color rose somewhat belligerently in Amy's cheeks, too;

"I don't see," she said, "why you feel that you have to take Marcelle Beaubien's part. If you knew all about her the way we girls do, you'd let her alone."

"I don't see how she ever came up here anyway," Norma remarked. "It's just exactly as if one of her brothers tried to come in. Do you think the boys would stand for that?"

"Why on earth shouldn't they?" demanded Kit, hotly. "And I'd like to know what they've got to say about it anyway. I don't think that's the college spirit. Any one who wants an education and is willing to work for it should be admitted."

"Yes, but if they had any sense at all," responded Norma, placidly, "they wouldn't put themselves into the position of being snubbed. You can talk all you want to about the college spirit from the standpoint of Deans and faculties, but when all's said and done, it's the student spirit that rules. I'll bet that she doesn't stay here a month. She hasn't any one to help her at home, and can't afford tutoring, so she'll just peter out."

"Dear, dear friends of my youth," Charity exclaimed, on her knees before the couch, "here are some wonderful chocolates and cheese straws and pimentoes. Let's have a love feast immediately and bury the hatchet. Kit, your hair isn't red enough to warrant any such exhibitions, and you'll have to cut them out."

The gong sounded in the hall below for afternoon classes, and there was just time to snatch a little refreshment before they joined the other girls trooping through the corridors. Kit found herself watching Marcelle. There was a peculiar aloofness about the girl which seemed to put almost a wall of defense around her. She was intensely interested in everything, one could see that plainly, except the other students, and it seemed as if she simply overlooked them. When Kit came down the staircase, she glanced into the library and saw Marcelle in there alone, bending down before the long wall bookcases. Across the wide hall there were groups of boys and girls in the two long double parlors, laughing and talking together, and every couch and settee along the T-shaped hall was occupied, but Marcelle was alone.

Whoever had built Hope College had managed to work out some of his dreams of old world beauty. The library was wainscoted in some dull satin finished wood, with the graining of olive wood. In the west wall was set a deeply embrasured mullioned window of stained glass, with the figure of a young girl in white in college cap and gown, her face upturned, as she seemed to come towards one through a garden of foxgloves, pale-pink and hyacinth in hue. Beneath was the one word, Hope. Scattered about the room on top of bookcases and shelves were the usual beloved bits of bronze and statuary, Dante's head, the Nike, with widespread wings, busts of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whitman, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Louisa Alcott, and a beautiful bowed head of Mrs; Browning, her curls half-shadowing her face.

Marcelle had a volume of "Treasure Island" in her hand, illustrated in color. She turned in surprise at the touch of Kit's hand on her shoulder.

"I thought we could walk down towards the bluff together, because we go the same way," said the latter. "How do you like it here?"

"I like it," responded Marcelle, slowly, with a certain dignified shyness that was characteristic of her. "My mother has told me all about it. She liked the library when she was here. She told me where her room was up-stairs, too, but I did not want to go up while the girls were there."

"Let's go up now, while they're all down-stairs," Kit suggested impulsively. "I'll take you. Which dormitory was she in?"

"Her name was Mary Douglas. It is the Douglas Dormitory. Her father was one of the founders here, Malcolm Douglas."

Kit listened in utter amazement and with a rising sense of joy. Here was Marcelle Beaubien, flouted and disdained by the little crowd of girls who happened to live in a certain restricted district of Delphi, but claiming her grandfather was a founder of the college. At that very moment Kit planned her surprise on the girls.

As they walked through the hall together, Pauline and the other girls followed them with their glances and smiled. The two paused before a big bronze tablet with the name of the founders on it. There it was, third from the last, Malcolm Douglas, and date, 1871.

"He came from Canada," said Marcelle, "and settled here. Later on he went into Minnesota, and on into Dakota as one of the first of the Indian fighters in the Sioux wars there, but he was really seeking gold. The family was very poor after he died, but my mother came here for two years, and even when I was a little bit of a girl, seven or eight, years old, before she died, she used to tell me how she loved it, and that I must come here, too."

"Don't any of your brothers want to come?" asked Kit impulsively. "They're all older than you, aren't they?"

Marcelle shook her head with a curious little smile.

"They are all Beaubien, every one. They eat, and they sleep and fish, that is all."

Kit led the way to the upper floor, where the dormitories were, and meeting Charity, she asked the way to the Douglas.

"Why, you were in that one to-day," replied Charity in surprise. "It's our dormitory, don't you know?"

"Oh, thank you so much," Kit said, with suspicious alacrity, as she guided Marcelle down the corridor, and Charity glanced back at them both, speculatively, wondering just what special business could take two new day girls into the most exclusive dormitory at Hope.



CHAPTER XIII

ENTER THE ROYAL MUMMIES

Kit deliberately planned her campaign for the following week, and the only girl she took into her confidence was Anne Bellamy. It had been the greatest relief, somehow, when Anne returned to Delphi for the fall term. There was something good-natured and comfortably serene about Anne that made her companionship a relief from that of the other girls. Jean often said back home that Kit was such a bunch of fireworks herself, she always needed the background of a calm silent night or a flaccid temperament, to set her off properly.

"You know, Anne," Kit exclaimed, sinking with a luxurious sigh of content down among the cushions on the broad couch in Anne's room, "I'd give anything, sometimes, if I'd been an only child; of course, you've got a brother, but you're the only girl. You don't know what it is to be one of four. I share my room with Helen, back home, and all honors with Jean. Then, of course, Doris is the baby, and while we all love each other devotedly, still you do have to elbow your way through a large family, if you want to keep on being yourself. I read somewhere about old Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras. Know him?"

Anne shook her head, as she combed out her long brown hair, holding one roll with her teeth.

"No, I don't suppose you do," Kit went on happily. "That's one reason why you and I are going to be fearfully good friends, 'cause you don't know everything in creation. It seems to me I can't speak of anything at all at home now that Jean doesn't know more about it than I do, or Helen thinks she does, which is worse. Don't mind me this morning. I just got a family budget, full of don'ts."

"Yes, and you're just as likely as not to be homesick to-morrow," laughed Anne. "Go on about your poet."

"Oh, nothing, except that he didn't believe there should be more than one room in a house, and he built little individual houses all over 'The Heights' out in California. I'd love to do that back home, with a dining-room on one green hill, and the kitchen down in the, valley."

"You'd need a mountain railway on an up grade, when it came meal time."

"Well maybe," Kit assented, "but at least I'd have my own bower in a pine grove, and each of the royal princesses could go and do likewise. But that isn't what I came over for. You know Marcelle Beaubien? The girls don't like her going to Hope."

"Don't they?" Anne asked, mildly. "Well, what are they going to do about it? I thought that's what colleges were for. Who's against her?"

"I don't think it's exactly anything definite or violent, but you know how mighty uncomfortable they can make her. There's Amy Roberts and Norma and Peggy Porter and the Tony Conyers crowd."

"She won't miss anything special, even if they do try to snub her," answered Anne laughingly.

"This is my second year at Hope, and I want to tell you right now that Charity rules in the Douglas Dormitory. If you can get her on Marcelle's side, the other girls will trot along like little lambkins."

"Do you suppose," Kit leaned forward impressively, as she sprang her plan, "do you suppose Charity would loan her room for a Founders' Tea?"

"A Founders' Tea," repeated Anne. "What's that?"

Kit proclaimed grandiloquently:

"A tea in honor of Malcolm Douglas, pioneer founder of Hope College, and grandfather of Marcelle Beaubien."

Anne's blue eyes widened in amazement, and her hair-brush was suspended in mid-air.

"How did you find out?" she whispered. "Does Marcelle know?"

"Of course she knows. She told me all about it herself, but I don't think she's got sense enough to realize what a nice handy little club of defense it gives her against the girls to spring it on them at the tea, and you've got to help me get it up. We'll coax Charity into loaning us her room first, and I'll look up all about Malcolm Douglas, and write a cute little essay about the historic founding of Hope. Then we'll send out mysterious little invitations, and just say on them, 'To meet a Founder's granddaughter.'"

"When?" asked Anne, reflectively. "You ought to do it soon, so if it works they'll take her into the different clubs right away. I think you ought to try and see Charity to-day after classes and get her advice. Another thing, Kit, do you suppose Marcelle would have any relics around of her grandfather that we could kind of spring on them unexpectedly?"

Kit's eyes kindled with appreciation.

"That's a worthy thought. Sort of corroborative evidence, as it were. Anne, you're a wonder." She sprang up from the couch, her hands deep in her white sweater pockets, looking very fit and purposeful. "I think it's up to me to go and prepare Charity. You make out a list of things that we'll want for the tea. You'd better be the refreshment chairman, and we'll try and make it a week from next Saturday."

"Too far off," Anne demurred. "Better do it while it's fresh in your mind, before you start lectures."

"I believe I'll go over now. It's only a little after five, and that'll keep me from answering that family budget until I've calmed down. If you see any one looking for me, tell them I'll be right straight back. I'll stop in the library and look up Malcolm's historic record, on my way, so you may truthfully announce I'm delving into research."

Kit went up the hill road buoyantly. Dearly she loved to set a goal ahead of her, and then run for it. Delphi had appeared rather barren as a field for her real endeavor, but now with the opening of school, she could see her way ahead to conscientiously starting something, which she sincerely hoped she could finish. Coming along the sidewalk which bounded the campus on the south, she met Charity on her way back from the post-office.

"This is ever so much better than going up-stairs," Kit said. "Let's walk around the campus twice, while I unburden my soul."

At the second lap, the whole plan had been matured by Charity's quick sympathy and understanding.

"And it will do them good, too," she said, as they parted. "That's not the college spirit by a long shot, and you're perfectly right, Kit, but just the same it's easier to get it on the girls in this way with a nice friendly accompaniment of sandwiches, and iced tea, and whatever you do, Kit, don't breathe one blessed word to anybody. I wouldn't even tell Marcelle herself that she is to be the guest of honor. She'd run like a deer, if she even suspected it."

The date of the Founders' Tea was set for the following Saturday. Kit evolved the invitations herself and wrote them on blank cards, as she remembered doing back at the Cove in the days of opulence and entertainment.

Saturday, October Second, Three to Five.

You are invited to attend a Founders' Tea, Douglas Dormitory, Hope College, Miss Allen's Study.

"Diffident, modest and correct," quoth Kit, critically, when she showed them to Anne. "Now, what are you going to eat, Anne? Isn't there something besides just plain tea? Couldn't we fix up some kind of glorified lemonade?"

"I've got it all down," answered Anne. "Grape juice, ginger ale and lemons. It's wonderful, and six kinds of sandwiches. Cheese with pimento, and cheese with chopped walnuts, lettuce and egg, chopped raisins with beaten white of egg, and raspberry jam and cream cheese, sardine on lettuce with mayonnaise and deviled ham, with macaroons on the side."

"It's perfectly dandy," exclaimed Kit. "Aunt Daphne told me when I first started in that I could give a spread for the girls, and this is it. After it's all over, I'll tell her about Marcelle, and I know she'll enjoy it and approve. I think we ought to get Peggy or Amy to write some kind of an anniversary ode for us. It might begin like this:

"Oh, have you a family founder, On your ancestral tree, Who laid the corner-stone of Hope On the campus at Del-phee."

"Better finish that up, and read it at the tea," advised Anne; "there's something so spirited about it. Is Charity going to decorate the study for the festal occasion? We ought to have something sort of different, don't you think so?"

"Pioneer relics would be the only thing, and I don't know where we'd scare those up."

"There's a whole cabinet of them in the Dean's room at the Assembly Hall."

The two girls looked at each other wisely. The subject really needed no argument or discussion. Kit said briefly:

"I'll try. I think I can get some of them anyway if I approach Uncle Cassius as a humble student seeking knowledge."

All unprepared for the onslaught, the Dean sat enjoying his after dinner smoke that evening when Kit tapped at the door.

"Come in," he called, a little bit testily, looking over his eye-glasses at the intruder. "I don't think I can talk with you just now, my dear," he said. "I am very busy working out a dynasty problem."

"Oh, but I'd love to help," Kit pleaded, "and I did help before on the aborigines of Japan, didn't I? I even remember their names, the Ainos."

"This is early Egyptian. Something you know nothing whatever about."

"Just mummies?" inquired Kit. "Oh, Uncle Cassius, we girls back home made up a lovely little couplet about that when we were studying Egypt at high school.

"'Heaven bless the royal mommies, And the jewels in their tummies.'"

No answering gleam of amusement showed in the Dean's eyes. In fact, be regarded her, Kit thought, rather severely for this unseemly display of levity.

"Of course," she added, hastily, "that was when I was very much younger than I am now. It was two years ago."

The Dean coughed deprecatingly, and turned back to the pamphlets before him.

"Remains have been discovered," he began in quite the tone he used in Assembly, "of the lost tribe of the Nemi. When the Greeks, my dear, obtained a foothold in Carthage and along the Mediterranean coast, the Nemi remained unconquered and retreated to the mountain fastnesses, west of the source of the Nile."

"Well, I know all about that," Kit answered, encouragingly, perching herself on the arm of a chair, across from him. "Just see," and she counted off on her fingers, "Livingstone-Stanley,—Victoria Falls—Zambesi—and Kipling wrote all about the people in 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy.'"

"No, no, no, not a bit like it!" the Dean exclaimed. "My dear child, learn to think in centuries and epochs. The long and short of it is, there have been some very wonderful remains of the Nemi recently discovered, and I have been honored by a commission from the Institute to write a complete summary of the results of the expedition and its historic significance."

"Don't you wish you'd been there when they dug them up? That's what I'd love, the exploring part, don't you know. I should think it would be fearfully dry trying to make bones sit up and talk, when you are so far away from it all."

"They are not sending me bones," replied the Dean with dignity, "but they are sending me the Amenotaph urn, and a sitting image of Annui. I believe with these two I shall be able to establish as a fact the survival of the Greek influence in ancient Egypt. My dear, you have no idea," he added, warmly, "how much this explains if it is true. There may be even some Phoenician data before I finish investigating."

"Phoenicians," thought Kit, although she said nothing. "Yes, I do remember about them, too. Tin,—ancient Britain—and something about Carthage, or was that Queen Dido?" Then she said aloud very positively and earnestly:

"I know I can help you a lot with this, Uncle Cassius, if you will only let me, because history is my favorite study, and the reason I came to speak to you to-night is this: We girls are going to have a Founders' Tea, Saturday afternoon, up at Hope; just a little informal affair, but I'd like to give it a——" She hesitated for the right word, and the Dean nodded encouragingly, being in a better mood.

"Semblance of verity? Are you preparing a treatise?"

"No. I want something they can look at," Kit explained, "and I knew if I told you about it, you'd let us take a few of the old things out of that cabinet in your room at Assembly Hall. All I need would be—well, say a few portraits of any of the founders of Hope, and any of the relics of the Indians or French explorers."

The Dean graciously detached a key from the ring at one end of the slender chain which barred his waistcoat.

Kit retired with it, as though she bore a trophy, and the next day the last preparations were completed for impressing on the freshman class the honor of having a Founder's granddaughter in their midst.



CHAPTER XIV

IN HONOR OF MARCELLE

"I think you ought to preside, Kit," Charity said as she arranged the tea table more handily before the corner couch. "It's your party, and you ought to pour."

"Takes too much concentration," Kit returned. "Anne'll help you. I want to have my mind perfectly clear to manage the thing. You see, Marcelle doesn't know a blessed thing about it yet, and there's no knowing how she'll take it. Wouldn't it be funny if she got proud and haughty, and marched away from our Founders' Tea?"

"I don't think you ought to spring it until after we've had refreshments. Food has such a mellowing effect on human nature. It's all a question of tact, though. If I were you, I'd talk to them in an intimate sort of way instead of lingering too much on the historic value. Better straighten Malcolm, over yonder; he looks kind of topply."

Kit regarded the framed steel engraving of Malcolm Douglas almost fondly. It had been taken from a history of early Wisconsin, together with some other founders fortunate enough to be included on the roll of honor, and had hung down in the Dean's room. Now it occupied a prominent spot specially cleared for it in the middle of the wall, and Kit had twined a long, double tendril of southern smilax around it, culled from the local florist's supply for any chance Delphi festivities.

Backed by Miss Daphne's approval and interest, Kit had called at several homes where lived the descendants of other founders, and the results were manifest. Mrs. Peter Bradbury had contributed two Indian blankets and a hunting-bag, besides an old pair of saddle bags used by her father, one of the early missionary bishops of the northwest, in his travels through the wilderness. Two fine timber wolf pelts lay on the floor, and of these Kit was specially proud. She had beguiled them from the treasure store of old Madame Giron, whose husband could still tell with fiery eyes and thrilling tone of how he had killed the animals not a quarter of a mile from the site of Hope College, in the old settler days.

From the cabinet in the Dean's room had come mostly records, old documents carefully framed, and several letters written by the founders themselves.

"You know," Kit said, as she gave a last touch to her exhibit, "of course these are important, but I like the Indian and hunting things best. I wish I could run away with that double pair of buffalo horns that belonged to Dr. Gleason's granduncle or somebody. I like them better than anything."

A quick rap came on the door, and before Charity could even call "come in" Peggy entered with her usual galaxy behind her, Amy, Norma, and a newcomer from Iowa, Henrietta Jinks, whom the girls had instantly dubbed "the Jinx," because of her infallible habit of everlastingly doing the inopportune thing.

"If it wasn't that her father was a congressman, she'd never get by with it," Amy had said, "but as it is, if you'll just remember that she's been reared on rhetoric and torch-light parades, you can understand that little abrupt way she has. I think it's rather interesting to be a 'Jinx,' it's so different, and the boys only have mascots. This way, it shows we have a fine, proud disregard for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Kit, my child, did you hear that? I'll be playing Ophelia before the New Year dawns."

"Tony Conyers sent word she'd be ready in five minutes," said Norma. "I think she's dressing up as something symbolical, and she's got a lot of the girls in there with her. Charity, I think this is a perfectly stupendous idea of yours."

"'Tisn't mine," retorted Charity, hurtling cushions handily from one couch to another in order to balance the room. "It's Kit's. This is her party. Her coming out party at Hope."

"Oh, are you the founder's granddaughter?" Amy inquired, her blue eyes opening widely.

"No, precious, I'm not," replied Kit, happily. "I wish this minute I could mount yon rostrum, Mid declaim the feats of my ancestors. They were pathfinders and Cavaliers, but I don't know of a single blessed founder among them. Peggy, don't sit on the almonds. They're right behind you in that glass dish."

The room filled up rapidly with members of the freshman class, and Kit declared after she had been the rounds four times that she felt exactly like the lecturer in the curio hall in a museum, telling the history of the relics over and over again. Nobody but Anne knew how anxious she became as the moments slipped by and no Marcelle appeared. It would never do to have a climax happen without the surprise of her presence to carry it off. The refreshments had all been served, and the little bronze dragon clock on top of the book shelves showed the hour of five, when Charity called:

"You'd better start in on your Founders' talk, Kit; we've only got about half an hour."

There was a baffled look in Kit's eyes, as she picked up the challenge and rose from the brown willow chair. Charity must know perfectly well how untimely it was to start to spring the surprise while there was a running chance of Marcelle appearing. Still there was a hush, and the girls faced her expectantly.

"As you all know," began Kit, "the old bronze tablet in the lower hall carries names on its roll of honor which not only uphold the glory of Hope College, but also of the entire town of Delphi, of the entire state, I may say, of Wisconsin."

"Kit," murmured Peggy, sotto voce, "if you start declaiming like that you'll have 'the Jinx' after your scalp. First thing we know, you'll begin, 'Ladies and fellow constituents.'"

Kit waited until the laugh had subsided, and Peggy had replaced the shell pins from her tumbled braids after a tussle with "the Jinx," who took all political allusions as personal affronts.

"There are few of us here to-day, if any," continued Kit, slowly, one eye watching the concrete walk across the campus from the nearest window, "who can boast of a Hope founder in her family."

"I can, almost," interrupted Antoinette, otherwise Tony; "my big sister Marie was engaged for a very little while to Bernard Giron. If she had only married him, we would have had a 'Founder' in the family."

"Tony," said Kit, severely, "I am dealing with facts, not prospects, and you ought not to reveal any family secrets, either. I say it is a great honor to be a direct descendant of a 'Founder,' and we have one in our class. A girl, too modest to take advantage of her grandfather's record." She paused impressively, but with a quickening gleam in her eyes, as there suddenly have in view a hurrying figure in gray sweater and dark crimson cap on the campus walk. It was Marcelle herself, late, but in time to create the desired sensation.

Kit drew a deep breath, and plunged back to her subject, considering exactly the time it would take for the belated guest to reach the study.

"Since all the girls here belong to this dormitory, it seems appropriate that the founder whose memory we honor should be Malcolm Douglas. His portrait hangs upon the wall, evidently taken from an old likeness." Oh, how she wished the home folks could hear her roll her phrases! "There is no more adventurous or thrilling career in the annals of historic Delphi than that of the illustrious Scotchman. Making his way through the perils of the wilderness, he came from Quebec with a party of fur traders and pioneer explorers."

"Don't hit too far back, Kit," interrupted Peggy, alertly. "If he was a founder in '71, you can't have him trotting over wilderness trails with Marquette and Lasalle, you know."

"Nevertheless," responded Kit, ignoring the levity of her nearest neighbor, "he is one of the heroes of our Wisconsin pioneer times. He came here in his early twenties, and married Lucia, the daughter of Captain Peter Morton. Their daughter was Mary, and, girls, she was the mother of one of our classmates, the very same Mary who went through Hope and graduated with high honors. You'll find her initials carved in Number 10 across the hall, and her portrait—the only one I could find—is in this graduating group."

The girls all crowded forward to look at the group photograph which Kit held out to them, just as a knock came at the door. For one dramatic instant Kit held the knob, her back against the door as she announced in almost a whisper:

"The granddaughter of Malcolm Douglas."

The girls leaned forward, eagerly, every eye fixed upon the door. As Kit said afterwards, laughingly to Anne:

"Goodness knows who they expected to see, but I almost felt as though I had promised them the excitement of a live mummy and then had sprung Marcelle. Oh, but wasn't she splendid, Anne? The way she stood the introduction and the shock of finding herself the guest of honor. As I looked at her, I thought to myself, you may be Douglas, and you may be Morton, fine old Scotch and English stock, but if it wasn't for the dash of debonair Beaubien in you too, you could never carry this off the way you are doing."

Marcelle was not the only person present who had to fall back on inherent caste for their manners of the moment, but Tony was the only one that gave an audible gasp. Even Peggy and Norma smiled, and greeted the Founder's granddaughter in the proper spirit.

She was dressed in white, just a plain kilted skirt and smock, but Kit gloried in the way she took her place beside Charity at the tea table, and parried the questions of the girls with laughing ease.

"Of course," she said, with the little slight accent she seemed to have caught from her father and old Grandmother Beaubien, "I thought every one in Delphi knew. For myself, I am proud of him, and of all my mother's people, but I am also proud of being a Beaubien. You girls do not know perhaps that some of my father's people helped to found Fort Dearborn, and they were very brave and courageous voyagers in the early days of New France."

Peggy really rose to the occasion remarkably, Kit thought. Probably the most zealously guarded membership in Hope's freshman class was that of the Portia Club, and yet, before the tea was over, she had invited Marcelle to attend the next meeting and be proposed for membership.

"We're not going to try a whole play at first, just famous scenes, and I know you'd fit in somewhere and enjoy it. Don't you want to, Marcelle?"

Marcelle shrugged her shoulders, deprecatingly.

"I shall be glad to help always," she said, with simple dignity, "if you wish to make me one of you. We have an old copy of Shakespeare at home that was my mother's, and I have read much of it in the long winter evenings. I think," she added, whimsically, "that I would rather play parts like Shylock or Hamlet than the girl roles, and best of all, I should love dearly to play Prince Hal."

"What do you think of that?" Anne said on the way home. "The idea of her being interested in Shakespeare at all or knowing anything about it, after living all her life in that little sand dump. Kit, you certainly have discovered a flower that was born to blush unseen."

"It will take her out of her shell, anyway," Kit replied, happily. "And I do think the girls came up to the mark splendidly. Heaven knows how they are talking about us now, behind our backs, but they acted their parts nobly when I swung that door open, and there stood, just Marcelle!"



CHAPTER XV

THE FAMILY ADVISES

No qualms of homesickness visited Kit the first two months after school opened. Not even New England could eclipse the glory of autumn when it swept in full splendor over this corner of the Lake States. Down east there was a sort of middle-aged relaxation to this season of the year. Kit always said it reminded her of the state of mind Cousin Roxy had reached, where one stood on the Delectable Mountains and could look both ways.

But here autumn came as a veritable gypsy. The stretches of forest that fringed the ravines rioted in color. The lakes seemed to take on the very deepest sapphire blue. No hush lay over the land as it did in the east, but there were wild sudden storm flurries, and as Kit expressed it, a feeling in the air as if there might be a regular circus of a cataclysm any minute.

Hardly a Saturday passed but what she was included in some motoring party. The Dean never joined these, but Miss Daphne thoroughly enjoyed her new role of chaperon. Sometimes the run would be further north, along the route to Milwaukee. Other days they would dip into the beautiful wooded roads that cut through the ravines, leading over towards Lake Delevan. And once, towards the end of November, in the very last spurt of Indian Summer weather, they took a week-end tour up to Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls.

"I only wish," Rex said, "that we could come up here next spring when they have their big logging time. It's one of the greatest sights you ever saw, Kit. I have seen the logs jammed out there in the river until they looked like a giant's game of jackstraws. Maybe we could arrange a trip, don't you think so, mother?"

"I don't see any reason why not," replied Mrs. Bellamy.

"But I won't be here then," protested Kit.

"Oh, you'll stay till the end of the spring term, dear," Miss Daphne corrected, and right there and then Kit experienced her first pang of homesickness. Would she really be away from the home nest until next June? Even with this novelty of recreation, backed by wealth, she felt suddenly as though she could have slipped away from it all without a single regret, just to find herself safely back home with the family.

When her next letter arrived at Maple Lawn, Jean read it over her mother's shoulder. The two younger girls were at school, and a little puzzled frown drew Jean's straight dark brows together.

"She's getting homesick, mother. Kit never writes tenderly like that unless she feels a heart throb. I never thought she'd last as long as she has——"

But Mrs. Bobbins looked dubious.

"She seems to have made such a good impression. I hate to have her spoil it by jumping back too soon. It's such a benefit for her."

Jean stopped polishing lamp chimneys and gazed out of the kitchen window towards the far-reaching fields, where none but the crows could find a living now. She was only able to run up from New York once a month, since she had taken a position of junior instructor at the Academy, and yet each time she found herself turning with a sigh of relief and safety from the city life to the peace of these everlasting hills.

"I don't blame her a bit if she wants to come back home before summer, mother dear. Money isn't everything."

"Oh, but Jean," sighed the Mother Bird, "it means so much in life. It's foolish to blind ourselves to all that it will do for us. I never try to deceive myself one bit, and I shall always miss the little luxuries and greater comforts of life that we had back at the Cove, before your father's health broke down, especially now that you girls are growing up so soon into womanhood. It isn't for myself I want it, but for you."

Jean laughed as she slipped her arms closer around her mother's neck.

"But you mustn't apprentice Kit to the Sign of the Dollar, just for the forlorn hope that Uncle Cassius and Aunt Daphne may send her home with a shower of gold. It seems to me if they were really and truly the right kind of family people, and cared for you and father, that they couldn't rest until they had handed over a splendid, generous slice of their money right now when it would do the most good."

"Oh, Jean, people never do that. But I do think they will leave something to you all."

"Leave something!" sniffed Jean, scornfully. "If there's anything in the world I thoroughly despise, it's old, mouldy, dead men's shoes. If I were you, I'd write and tell Kit that she could come home at the Christmas vacation if she wanted to."

But Cousin Roxy took an entirely different view of the matter when she was consulted.

"Fiddlesticks," she said. "No girl of Kit's age knows what she wants two minutes of the time. She's doing good missionary work out there, and she must not become weary in well doing or draw back her hand from the plow. You don't need her here at all, Elizabeth. Helen's getting plenty old enough to take hold and help."

"Oh, but she's so young, Roxy, to have responsibility thrust upon her."

"Can't have it too young," retorted Mrs. Ellis, buoyantly. "It's what tones up the muscles of the spirit. From what I know about Cassius Cato Peabody, I should say that what he needed most was a trumpet call from the Lord to make him take an interest in the land of the living instead of mummies and buried cities."

So two letters went back to Kit, and in hers the Mother Bird could not resist slipping a hint that perhaps it would be a wise thing to ask the Dean about terminating her visit at Christmas time. But Jean added in hers:

"Mother's afraid you are homesick, or that they may be tired of you by this time, but if I were in your place, Kit, I'd try to stay until June. Father thinks the Hall may be done in time for us to go into it next month, but we've had lots of wet weather, and Cousin Roxy says it would be horribly unhealthful to move in before the plaster has had a chance to thoroughly dry. Shad goes down every day with father, and they've kept the fire going in the furnace, so I suppose that will help some, but there isn't a particle of need for your coming back, except mother's dread that you may be homesick, and you're getting too old to mollycoddle yourself, Kit, where there's a big interest at stake."

Kit read this with lowering brow.

"It's so nice to have been born Jean, and speak on any subject as the eldest sister," she said, scornfully. "I know perfectly well that mother needs me when she is moving back into the new house, and I never expected to stay so long when I came, anyway."

She stopped short, meditating on just what this queer, choky feeling was that had swept over her. Helen and Jean always liked to take a new emotion and analyze it, but Kit rarely concerned herself with motives or causes. And now she only knew that she would have given up everything, future hopes of the Dean's bestowing bequests broadcast in the robins' nest, and all the winter's fun at Hope College, just to be safely back home with all the dear familiar faces around her.



CHAPTER XVI

SHOPPING FOR SHAKESPEARE

It was Saturday morning. She had been elected a member of the Portia Club, and even now rehearsals were under way for the first performance the second week in December. There was to be one that morning at Amy's study, the scene between Rosalind, Orlando, and Celia. Kit was Orlando on account of her height and carriage. As Amy said:

"You've got the air, Kit, that goes with doublet and hose and Lincoln green."

"Lincoln green was in Robin Hood's time," retorted Kit.

"Yes, but it's all that foresty stuff, don't you know. You can play Mercutio next month in the 'Merchant of Venice.'"

"No, I want to be Shylock. I love character parts. I don't see why you have to pick out these little tame scenes when we could have Lear and Edgar and the Fool on the heath, or Dick the Third or Macbeth. I'd play any of those for you. We used to have plays back home just amongst us girls, and I was always the leading heavy. We even tried putting on 'Faust' in the barn when the hay-lofts were empty, but that does need atmosphere."

"Dear wayward, fearless sister," answered Amy, kindly, "what you haven't found out here is this. Thus far we can go and no farther. The faculty would expire seeing you as King Lear. Discreetly may ye pose as Orlando, or any other gentle lad, with a sweeping cloak about thee, but I doubt if the Dean would even beam on Hamlet."

"I'm a splendid Hamlet," Kit said, thoughtfully. "I doubled in 'Hamlet' and 'The Raven' in the same costume down home. Just the soliloquy, of course, though we'd have tried the grave-diggers scene only we didn't have any skulls."

But Amy had not thought favorably of deviating from the usual program. Scenes from "As You Like It," as usual, was to be the first effort. Kit glanced at the clock, and caught up her sweater and cap. It was quarter of ten, and she was due at Amy's at ten. As she ran down-stairs, she encountered the Dean, happily directing two expressmen carry a large box back into the study.

"My dear, it has come," he told her. "I'm hoping they will both be here, the Amenotaph urn and the statue of Annui. I do not wish to be disturbed just now while I am unpacking them, as it takes a great deal of care and delicacy and you will ask too many questions, Kit, but if you will come in after lunch, I will explain the inscriptions to you."

"Oh, I'd love to, Uncle Cassius," Kit answered, eyeing the box hopefully. "I'm going up to a rehearsal at the Hall."

The Dean smiled absently and nodded his head at her.

"Look up Annui while you are there, also Semele."

Lysander, the puppy, bounded to meet her as she hurried down the walk, and at the sidewalk curb she found the Bellamy car waiting.

"Just in time," called Rex, cheerily. "Where are you bound for?"

Kit took the seat beside him gratefully. The wind from the lake blew cuttingly, and there was a flurry of first snowflakes in the air wavering about uncertainly like birds that had lost their way.

"Where's Anne?" she asked. "Isn't she going up to rehearsal?"

"Gone down to Brent's first. I'm going to stop and pick her up. She's been building a costume all the morning."

The car swung around the corner of Maple Avenue and down the hill towards the village, leaving Lysander sitting at the corner, wailing dolefully.

Brent's was the local emporium for everything needed, from the college standpoint. Not only were its shelves filled with goods which varied from library supplies to latest fiction, but there was an ice cream parlor annex patronized almost entirely by students.

Anne was engrossed over a selection of patterns at the counter in the back of the store. She was to play Celia, and Norma was Rosalind. Charity always said that Norma's profile and long corn-colored hair brought her more undeserved honors than any qualities of excellence she possessed.

"I'm so glad you came along just now," sighed Anne. "Mother says I ought to dress very simply, but a Duke's daughter would have even a stuff dress cut in fashion, wouldn't she? Besides, I can show a lot of taste in my cap. Norma's got a perfectly wonderful cloak made of a dark green felt piano cover."

Kit helped her select a dull violet goods, with white underslip that showed through the slashes in the sleeves. Anne had been hovering over an old rose that absolutely killed any glint of color in her light brown hair.

"Never, never," warned Kit, "let old rose come near you, if you've got freckles or sandy hair. Don't you notice, Anne, how I cling to all the soft pastel nondescript tones? That's because my eldest sister is an artist, and we all have to live up to it more or less now. When Jean wants a new dress she slips away and communes with nature, until she's hit the right tone values. You should have seen her face one day when some one asked Doris her favorite color, and she said, 'plaid.'"

"We're going to be late to rehearsal," Anne declared with a sigh, as they rose to leave.

"We are late now," rejoined Kit, cheerfully. "They'll prize us all the more if we keep ourselves kind of scarce. Rex told me to order walnut sundae for him, and wait until he comes back."

Just at this moment Anne laid her finger on her lips and glanced impressively at a table on the other side of the room. There sat Amy with Peggy Porter and Norma, all of them dreamily imbibing ice cream sodas, just as though Shakespearian rehearsals were occasions unknown in their engagement calendars.

Kit rose and crossed the room with caution until she stood behind Amy and intoned sepulchrally from Macbeth:

"What ho! Ye secret, black and midnight hags, what is't ye do?"



CHAPTER XVII

HOPE'S PRIMROSE PATH

"Well, we waited fifteen minutes for you," protested Amy, laughingly, "and Norma had to come down-town to try and find some high boots like Julia Marlowe wore for Rosalind. She's had that old picture of her pinned up on the wall for two weeks."

"Oh, and listen, Kit," Norma broke in; "you know that suede brown leather table cover of mine; I just took and slashed it around the edges and bent it over an old tam-o'-shanter crown and it looks exactly like the hat she wore. You know I've been considering rather seriously. Don't you really think that I'm peculiarly fitted for this sort of a career? Of course I'd only play Shakespearian parts, although I'd love to be Joan of Arc like Maude Adams was at Harvard, or play the old Greek tragedies at that Stadium place, somewhere in California. I've been studying Electra a little bit."

"Have you?" questioned Kit, kindly. "You dear child, you. So young and yet so aspiring. Finish your chocolate ice cream soda, and we'll run along. Rex just came with his car and we can all pile into it."

The rehearsal passed off splendidly, barring sundry interpolations by Kit into Orlando's flights of fancy.

"I think he would have had to have been much more interesting to have held the love of such a girl as Rosalind," she protested. "Heroes are awful people anyway, I think. The only ones I really like are explorers. Uncle Cassius said the other day that the most unique experience was to be the first white man to step foot on new territory. I may take up forestry as a profession, but I'd much rather be a woman explorer."

"Deserts, islands or mountain peaks?" queried Amy, as she dipped into her store of supplies under the couch for some hasty refreshments.

"Caves, I think," said Kit, darkly; "caves or islands. Don't give me anything to eat, 'cause I have to look up something in the library before I go home, and I'm late for lunch now."

"Just pimento cheese on crackers, and I've got some chocolate marshmallows here somewhere." Amy's voice was muffled under the couch cover. But the clock on the mantel pointed at twelve-fifteen, and Kit knew the Dean's punctilious regard for keeping meal hours.

The library was unoccupied, apparently. Kit went over to the lower book shelves which contained the reference books on archaeology, dragging a low stool after her.

"A-men-o-taph," she said, under her breath. "Likewise Semele."

With the two volumes on her knees, she started to read up the references which the Dean wanted, when all at once she was conscious of some one who stood in the embrasured window at the west end of the room, looking at her. For a moment Kit was absolutely speechless, not believing the evidence of her own eyes. But the next moment Billie's own laugh, when he found out he had been discovered, startled her with its reality.

"Billie Ellis," she exclaimed, springing to her feet and scattering reference books and note paper helter-skelter. "How on earth did you ever get way out here?"

Billie shook hands with her, coloring boyishly, as he always did at any display of emotion, and trying to act as if it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for him to appear at Delphi, Wis., when he was supposed to be at Washington in school.

"We got our test exams last week, and Stanley had to run out to Minnesota for the government, so he took me along to help him."

"Billie, are you really after bugs and things—I mean, are you going to really be a naturalist?"

"I guess you'd kind of call it being a business naturalist," laughed Billie. "I don't think I'll ever live in a shack on a mountainside, and write beautiful things about them, now that I know Stanley. You want to roll up your sleeves and go to work like he does."

"Is he here, now?" asked Kit, eagerly.

"Yep." Billie nodded oat of the window, towards Kemp Hall, the boys' dormitory. "After we found out that you didn't live here, we were going on down to the Dean's to find you, but he looked over the boys' freshman class, and found he had a cousin or nephew or somebody on the list, Clayton Diggs."

"I know him," Kit exclaimed. "He's High Jinks' cousin. Regular bean pole, with freckles, but mighty nice. I've got to be back for lunch, and you're coming down with me, of course. How long can you stay?"

"Just this afternoon. We're going back on the five forty-five, and catch the night express east. If you wait here, I'll chase after Stanley, 'cause he'll want to have lunch with the Diggs boy, and he can join us later."

Kit walked along the macadamized path which crossed the campus. It was bordered by dwarf evergreen, but the students had named it Hope's primrose path, owing to the temptation to dally along it, whenever one had the chance.

The coming of Billie unexpectedly, just at a time when she was feeling her first homesickness, struck Kit as being a special little gift handed out to her by Providence. But with only five hours to visit with him, she knew it would be all the harder after he had gone. He joined her on a run as she reached the sidewalk, and they hurried down to the Dean's just in time for luncheon. Kit's face was fairly radiant as she presented her old-time chum of the hills to Miss Daphne and the Dean.

"Don't you remember, Uncle Cassius," she asked eagerly, "how, when I first came, I told you all about the boy back home who would have just suited you? Well, that was Billie."

The Dean's gray eyes wrinkled as he surveyed Billie over the tops of his eye-glasses.

"You come highly recommended, young man," he said. "Kit almost persuaded me that if she didn't suit I might be able to coax you away from your grandfather."

"I'll bet you wouldn't change now," Billie responded, gallantly. "Kit knows a hundred per cent, more than I do, sir. I used to hate history until she took to telling me stories about it, and making it interesting. All I really care about is natural history, especially insects and birds."

"Well, you could have a lovely time studying over uncle's Egyptian scarabs," said Kit, placidly. "Weren't you telling me something about a place in China where they had a whole grove filled with sacred silkworms, Aunt Daphne?"

Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young face to the other. Never before had youth sat lunching at that table with her and her brother in quite such a radiant guise. The Dean usually took his noontide meal in absolute silence when they were alone together, as he held that desultory conversation disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit's coming, it had been impossible to check her flow of talk, until now the Dean actually missed it if she happened to be absent.



CHAPTER XVIII

STANLEY APOLOGIZES

After lunch they all went into the library to look over the Dean's newly arrived treasures.

"Well, for pity's sakes," exclaimed Kit, as she stood before the plain, squat, terra-cotta urn, "is that the royal urn? I expected to see something enormous, like everything else that is wonderful and ancient in Egypt."

"Dear child," the Dean responded, happily, as he bent down to trace the curious, cuneiform markings which circled the urn. "This antedates the time of the Captivity and Moses. I cannot tell positively, until I have opened it and deciphered what I can of the papyrus rolls within. If it should go back to Moses, it will be wonderful. I cannot believe that it is contemporary with Nineveh. Daphne, you can recall how overjoyed I was when we unearthed that library of precious clay under the Nineveh mounds years ago. Think of reading something which was written by living man several thousand years before that."

"What fun it must have been," Billie remarked. "If you wanted to write anything in those days, you just picked up a handful of mud and made a little brick out of it, and wrote away with a stick, didn't you?"

"Stylus, my boy, stylus," corrected the Dean, absently. "Yes, I doubt not but what it did away with much of our modern detail."

"Oh," exclaimed Kit, suddenly, "I left all the notes on Semele in the library. I'm awfully sorry, Uncle Cassius, but when I saw Billy standing there unexpectedly, I just forgot everything. We can walk up there this afternoon and get them. Is the statue very beautiful?"

"Perfect, perfect," murmured the Dean, as he still hung over the urn abstractedly. "It's just behind you, my dear."

Kit turned, expecting to face one of the usual blandly smiling Egyptian colossi, even in miniature, with a few wings scattered over it here and there. But instead, there stood in the center of the Dean's library table a strangely attenuated figure about three feet high. As Billie said afterwards, it appeared to be dancing the Grasshopper's Nocturnal Rhapsody. It had a head that was a cross between an intelligent antelope and a rather toploftical baby rat. Its arms were extended at sharp angles, and seemed to be pointing in arch accusation at one. Wings spread fanwise from the shoulders, and its feet were like the feet of a griffin.

"I never thought it would look just like that, did you, Billie?" Kit asked confidentially, when they started back to the campus, after the notes on Semele.

"Well, I knew well what to expect, because we've been doing the Smithsonian Institute pretty well," responded Billie, rather knowingly. "Some of them look worse than that. But they can't beat our own little Alaskan and Mexican beauties. I wonder what people were thinking about back in those days to worship that sort of thing?"

But Kit caught sight of five of the girls just rounding the corner after a hike along the shore, and she hailed them, much to Billie's inward disgust. While he approved thoroughly of Kit, he viewed the average girl from a safe altitude indifference. But Kit introduced him in an off-hand, casual manner which put him at his ease, and when they started up the primrose path, it was the "Jinx" herself who had taken possession of Billie, and was interesting him thoroughly, telling of her father's big stock farm outside of Maquoketa.

They found Stanley Howard awaiting them on one of the big tree seats, outside the Hall. Clayton was with him, strumming on a ukulele, as they talked, happily and lazily. The girls followed Kit into the library, as she went on a hunt after Semele, and here Amy faced her accusingly.

"You never told us a word about this Billie boy," she declared, "and ever since you came here, you've made believe to overlook boys. You haven't wanted them in any of our affairs. You made fun of the girls who did want them, and all the time you've had this one up your sleeve. Kathleen, explain."

"If he's a relative," Peggy interposed, serenely, "we'll let you off. You've never been initiated into anything. You haven't even had your freshman hazing, because the Dean doesn't approve of such doings, and we felt that we'd better keep it out of the family, but there are limits, aren't there, girls?"

Kit laughed up at them, as she groped about on the floor picking up the scattered pages of notes.

"Well, he's a relative, if you must know," she retorted. "He's my father's first cousin's husband's grandchild. Now haze me if you like."

Vowing that this connection was altogether too nebulous to save her from the threatened penalty, the girls buried the hatchet for the time being in the entertainment of the guests.

"I suppose Hope looks pretty small to you after the universities back east," Norma said to Billie, as they made the rounds of the buildings, after Amy had played hostess with Kit's help, and had brought down a goodly supply of fudge and peanut nougat.

"Looks mighty good," returned Billie, heartily. "I think you can have loads more fun in a place like this than you can at the big schools. And you know, I'm not going to a university or anything of that sort. I'm just at the 'Prep' and taking up special branches outside with Mr. Howard."

"What kind of branches?" queried Norma.

"Oh, science, and physics, but specially entomology and forestry. He's in government service, you know."

"He doesn't act a bit important or dignified, does he?" Norma said thoughtfully. "You'd almost think he was a sort of grown-up boy."

"I wish I knew all he does. It's mighty nice for a fellow to have a friend like Stanley. It's like being a little bicycle running in the track of a speeding motorcycle. You may not be able to keep up, but it's mighty good exercise trying to hit the pace."

Kit was walking behind the others with Amy and Anne. Now that they had joined the others, and the girls were talking about Stanley also, she had become strangely silent.

"You don't know him very well, do you?" Amy asked, curiously. "I mean, he isn't related to you."

Kit shook her head with bland indifference.

"He's a friend of Billie's. I only met him down east when he came to chase the gypsy moth in Gilead."

She did not add that with Shad's help and able cooperation, she had managed to curtail the chase of the gypsy moth, temporarily, by holding the chaser captive in the family corn-crib, but she inwardly suspected that Stanley was remembering it. Every once in a while she accidentally caught him looking at her, with a look of amused, interested retrospection that made her vaguely uncomfortable.

As they left the campus, Norma, leading with Billie, took the street that led to the bluffs overlooking the lake, and somehow or other in the subsequent scramble down the narrow pathways, Kit found Stanley at her elbow. Even Jean could not have been more dignified or distant in her manner, but Stanley refused to be frozen out.

"You know," he said, genially, "I've just found out something, Miss Kit. I forgave you long ago for locking me up in your corn-crib, and nearly landing me in the local calaboose, but you don't forgive me one bit for trespassing in your berry patch."

Kit's profile tilted ever so slightly heavenward. Jean had loved to quote to her in the old days that consistency was a jewel, and William of Avon had said so positively, whereupon Kit would swing always, feeling herself backed by Emerson's opinion that "consistency was a hobgoblin of little minds." Yet now she felt herself feeling almost righteously consistent. She had thoroughly made up her mind that very day when Mr. Hicks made his memorable and fruitless journey to Greenacres that not even government experts had any right to climb over fences into people's private property without first asking permission. Perhaps the sudden popularity of the trespasser with all the other members of the family had something to do with Kit's stand against him. Even Helen had remarked that she didn't see how on earth Kit could ever have imagined a person looking like Mr. Howard could be a berry hooker.

"I don't want you to forgive me," she said, calmly. "I've never been one bit sorry for it. I think you ought to have come up to the house and asked permission to go in there. And you never said that you were sorry. It always seemed to me as if you rather acted as if you thought it was a good joke"—she hesitated a moment, before adding pointedly,—"on me."

"Suppose I apologize now." Stanley's tone was absolutely serious, but Kit, with one quick look at the precipitous path, ahead of them, laughed.

"Not here, please. Wait until we hit the level shore. You do really have to pay attention on this path, or you miss your footing and toboggan all at once."

"Then, suppose," he persisted, "we just consider that I have apologized. And if you accept, you can raise your right hand at me."

Kit immediately raised her left one, and waggled it provocatively over her shoulder. Before he could say any more, she had hurried ahead and caught up with the rest.



CHAPTER XIX

THE COURT OF APPEAL

It was not until after they had gone, when Kit was by herself, that she remembered all Billie had told her, at the very last of his stay.

They had walked along the lake shore together, a little behind the others, after the Beaubien family had been visited.

"You haven't told me anything at all," Kit said, "about home. When were you in Gilead last?"

"Just before we came west," Billie answered.

"Was everything all right?" Billie hesitated. "Oh, for heaven's sake, Billie, tell me if there is anything. You can't give me any nervous shocks at all, and I'm dying to find an excuse to get back home."

"Why, there isn't anything the matter, exactly," Billie said, cheerfully, but with a certain reservation in his tone, that made Kit long to get him with a good grip in his curly hair and shake him the way she used to do two years ago. "The only thing that I know about, I heard grandfather telling Uncle Jerry. I don't suppose I ought to repeat it either."

"Billie, I wish I could shake you right here by the Michigander sea. How dare you keep back any news of my family from me?"

"It was something about there not being any more dividends until after the war, on some stock. I guess it hit grandfather, too, but I heard him say that there wasn't a farm up there that couldn't support itself, properly run, and he guessed they'd all weather the storm."

Kit frowned heavily.

"Stock," she repeated with scorn. "The very idea, anyway, of taking real money and giving it away for a lot of little certificates. If I had money I'd put it in a nice clean, dry, covered tin pail, and hang it down my well, just like Jerushy said she always did when she had a ten-dollar bill around that worried her. And there Dad's got all the expense of rebuilding Greenacres. It's going to be a regular White Elephant, I'm afraid, because it isn't all paid for anyway, and there's the yearly interest." She hesitated before she added, slowly, "I wonder why on earth it is, Bill Ellis, that the people with the most children who need the most money always seem to be hunting for it, and these nice, old, placid darlings, like the Dean and Miss Daphne, have simply got oodles planted away somewhere, and never have to think twice over where the next windfall is coming from."

But Billie was inclined to take an optimistic view of the whole affair.

"Grandfather said that there was no cause for worry; it was just a case of pitch in and get your living out of the farms again."

"Yes," said Kit, with fine scorn, "get your living out of the farms. That's all very well for him to say, when he's got everything to do with, and twenty of the best cows in Windham County, but we moved up there on hope and a shoe-string. And we've never really raised anything except chickens and children. You know, Billie, even with a small income, how you can play country gentleman to your heart's content in a little place like Gilead."

"Stanley says your place, if it was properly worked, would make one of the finest fruit farms up there, 'cause all your land slopes to the south as far as the river. He says if he had it he'd sell off the heavy timber for cash and put the money right into hardy varieties of fruit and hogs."

Kit laughed.

"Can't you see Helen's face over the hogs, when she has wanted to raise bulbuls and white peacocks, with a few antelopes and gazelles wandering around. But I suppose one could keep the hogs out of sight, they wouldn't have to graze on the front lawn. Did he tell Dad that?"

"I don't know," Billie said, doubtfully. "You know, Uncle Jerry's kind of hard to get confidential with over his own affairs, but I wouldn't worry, Kit, if I were you. Things always come out all right."

"They do not," returned Kit, calmly. "Even Cousin Roxy says that you have to give Providence a helping hand now and then. I'm going to think up a way to start those hogs rambling over the southern slopes of Greenacre Hall."

Billie smiled at her mischievously.

"That's the new name, isn't it? You'll be a nice crowd of farmerettes next summer, won't you?"

"Maybe it'll happen before next summer," prophesied Kit, sagely. "Jean and mother like to call it Greenacre Hall, but I like Greenacre Farm, if we're going to do any business there. Thanks ever so much for telling me, Billie. You may have changed the course of destiny, because I can tell you now I'm going home."

After dinner that night Kit was out on the veranda alone for a while with only Sandy at her feet. There was a light in the study bay window. Miss Daphne had gone over to a meeting of the Women's War Chest committee at the Bellamys'. Kit was wondering whether it would be best to write first to her mother or to Jean. Jean would be leaving a few days after Christmas for New York anyway. How she longed to know just exactly what the family's plans were for the winter. But the worst of it was, one of the Robbins' failings or virtues as a family was for each member to spare the other members all the worry and bother possible, by carefully concealing any little personal troubles. To Kit this was all wrong. What on earth, she used to argue, was the use of being a family if you didn't all lean on each other and derive mutual strength and support?

Finally, she decided to write to Cousin Roxy herself. There was always something satisfactory in making her the court of appeal, on any point of doubt; even though her decision might not be a favorable one, you always felt sure you were getting it straight without any affectionate bias.

Accordingly, a confidential appeal went speeding east, and back came the reply, by return mail, as Kit had known it would.

"DEAR CHILD:—

"I had been thinking about you when your letter came, so I suppose our mental wireless calls must have crossed.

"There's no doubt at all but what your mother needs you badly right here, especially with Jean leaving right after Christmas. What Billie told you was about the truth. Out of the wreck of matter and crush of worlds that happened at Shady Cove, when your father's business and health failed, they did manage to save enough to give them a little income. Then, as you know, it was mostly your mother's money that was paid down on Greenacres in a lump, so that stopped her share coming in.

"The fire didn't help matters along one bit, but the Judge took a first mortgage on the property, and the money went into the repairs.

"I don't see why you aren't old enough to know these things, 'cause land knows the time is coming soon enough when you will have to put your shoulder to the wheel, like Jean, and help. It seems too bad that some folks I could mention can't see their duty when it's right under their nose. Just as soon as the Lord sees fit to call him home, Cassius Cato Peabody will have to leave some of his money to his nephew, your father, Jerry. Of course, he may take it into his head to endow some sacred seat of learning on the banks of the Nile, where they can study all the stars and cats and cows they want to. For my part, I think if he'd look a little way beyond his nose this minute, and see his duty to the living, he'd be a good deal happier in the long run.

"Be careful how you open up the ashes of old Amenotaph. I don't see how he can keep the pesky things around. Makes me think of Eliza Ann Gifford, after the Deacon died. She had his ashes in a little bronze, brown box on the front room mantel, and fresh flowers on 'em every day of her life. Used to give one a fearful turn every time they called on her. So far as I'm concerned, I'm perfectly willing to wait for Gabriel's last trump to let my dust and ashes rest in a decent grave.

"If I were you, Kit, I'd have a heart-to-heart talk with the Dean himself, and I know your mother will be just as relieved as can be to hear you're homeward bound."



CHAPTER XX

HOGS AND HORACE

Kit was delighted over the whole spirit of the letter, and went directly to the Dean with its message. He was deeply engrossed in getting up his first notes and commentaries on the urn and statue. It had not seemed for the past two or three weeks as if he resided any longer in Delphi at all. Kit told Miss Daphne she was positive he was wandering through Egypt all the time, the Egypt of five thousand years ago. And it was only the shadow of his self that seemed to sit closeted for hours in the study.

He hardly glanced up now as she came in, but smiled and nodded when he saw who it was, keeping on with his writing.

"Just hand me that volume on the second shelf to your right by the door. Second volume, 'Explorations in Upper Egypt.' Look up Seti I in the index."

Kit found the place and laid it before him, perching herself on one end of the desk, as she always did when she wanted to attract his attention. The little statuette of Annui smiled grotesquely down upon her from its pedestal. The urn stood in a handy place of honor upon the desk itself as the Dean had been deciphering the inscriptions upon it.

"I hate to disturb you, Uncle Cassius," Kit began, with the directness so characteristic of her, "but I really think I ought to go back home. You've been wonderful to give me such a long visit, and I've enjoyed the school work immensely, but somehow I begin to feel like a soldier who has been away on a furlough. It's time for me to get back to the firing line, because mother needs me."

The Dean glanced up in surprise, and came slowly out of his dream of concentration as the meaning of her words dawned upon him.

"Why, my dear child," he exclaimed, "this is very sudden. There has never been any question about your going back, at least——" He coughed deprecatingly. "Not since we became acquainted with you. Has anything happened?"

"Why, nothing special—I mean, nothing tragic. It's only this, Dad's lost a lot of money all at once. He did have a little income, enough so we never have had to depend on the farm entirely, but now, even that has been swept away. I suppose it will come back some time after the war, but as I understand it, the stock he had has stopped paying dividends."

"Jerry never had any head for business." The Dean tapped one hand lightly with his tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles in an absent-minded musing way that nearly drove Kit frantic. "But what can you do about it, my dear? Surely by returning at such a time you merely add to your father's burdens."

"No, I won't," Kit answered, decidedly, "because I've got a plan that I've been thinking about for ever and ever so long. I'm going to try and persuade Dad to let us put in hogs."

"Hogs," repeated the Dean, in a baffled tone. "Hogs, my dear. Who ever heard of raising hogs when they could raise anything else at all? I'm sure that Horace never tried hogs on his farm."

Now it just happened that Kit had a smattering knowledge of Horace, gleaned from Billie. In the old days back home, when they had studied together, they had seemed to always get the personal side of the old heroes and people of fame. And just now the only thing she could remember about Horace popped up in her mind.

"Well, I'll bet a cookie there was many a time when he wished he had. Don't you remember how he wrote,

"'Give me again my hollow tree, A crust of bread and liberty.'

"We've had our hollow tree, and I'm afraid unless we get right down to business now, we'll have all the crusts of bread and liberty we fancy. I just can't stay here in this beautiful place with nothing to worry over, while the family are practically in a lifeboat with breakers ahead."

If the Dean had known Kit better, he would have realized that in emotional moments she was prone to exaggerated similes, but as it was, he felt impressed.

"Why, God bless my heart and soul," he exclaimed, "I had no idea it was as bad as this. I thought Jerry was very comfortably fixed."

"Oh, we were at the Cove. We had everything we wanted, but father was sick an awfully long while after his breakdown, and he's never been able to do any work since."

"But how ridiculous for a man to bury himself and all his capital in a place like Gilead," the Dean protested, somewhat testily. "He could have done a great many other things, I should imagine."

Kit leaned over and looked at him, right in the eye.

"Uncle Cassius, what would you do if everything was just swept away from you, health, money, home and your work; what do you suppose you would do? If there was any spot of earth that was peaceful and restful, and that you loved best, wouldn't you want to go to it? That's what Gilead means, 'the place of healing.'"

There was silence in the old study. The Dean was looking straight at Annui as if for inspiration, and yet it was not the old image which he saw, but a vision of Gilead as he remembered it in his boyhood, a vision of green hills spanning the horizon, of fertile valleys and many watercourses. Memories stirred in his mind of Jerry Robbins' mother, his sister. Sometimes Kit reminded him of her, in her buoyant self-reliance and optimism.

The bonds of relationship had always been somewhat intangible to him, since he had grown up. He had laid out his own career himself, and had carried every ambition to completion and reality. The last twenty years had been years of fruition, of honors freely given, years of fulfillment. He had not been, like Judge Ellis, intolerant of other men's failures; he had simply ignored them, never feeling any responsibility towards the weaker ones who fell in the race. In his way, he prided himself upon a gentle, aloof philosophy of life which left him the boundaries of the old study as a horizon of happiness.

Probably not until that moment had he realized the gradual revolutionary process Kit had been putting him through ever since her arrival. She had trained him into having an interest in other people and things, until now it was impossible for him not to see the picture of Greenacres as she did.

"How did you find out about this, my dear?" he asked.

"Well," Kit replied, honestly, "partly from Billie and partly from this letter from Cousin Roxy. You know Cousin Roxy, don't you, Uncle Cassius?"

The Dean's eyes twinkled reminiscently as he took the letter.

"Oh, yes, I remember Roxana well. She used to bully me outrageously." He opened the letter and started to read slowly, just as Kit suddenly remembered Cousin Roxy's remarks on Cassius Cato Peabody. But there was no turning back now. Straight through to the end he read, and several deep chuckles broke the silence, real chuckles of delight, such as Kit had never heard from the Dean. When he had finished, he handed it back to her.

"Perfectly true, my dear," he said. "I can quite see why you feel that you are needed. You had better take your midwinter examinations, and prepare to return home about Christmas. In all likelihood your Aunt Daphne and I will accompany you."



CHAPTER XXI

THE CIRCLE OF RA

The next thing was to break the news gently and convincingly to the family. Kit figured it out from all sides, and finally decided to walk right up to the horns of the dilemma in a fearless attack. Writing back a long, chatty letter to the Mother Bird, she simply tacked on the postscript:

"Don't be at all surprised to see me arrive with the other Christmas packages, and have a fire laid in the guest room."

At first she had thought only the Dean would accompany her, but when Miss Daphne heard of the plan, she declared she would not be left out of it.

"Why, brother, I haven't seen any of the folks down east in years and years, and it would hearten me up wonderfully to visit them. I think I'd like to be with Roxy as much as possible, because we were girl friends together."

Whether it was the prospect of going home or the longing to leave a good record behind her, no one could say, not even Kit herself, but she took her midwinter examinations with full speed up and colors flying, as Billie would say.

The girls took her coming departure with many objections, but they proceeded to give her various send-offs. Charity and Anne decided on a formal tea, up in the former's room, but the solemnity of the occasion was banished when Peggy rose to read some farewell poesy, concocted by herself and the "Jinx."

"She hoped to be the hope of Hope Alas, how soon she flew, To bleak New England's rock-ribbed hills, Ere she her Virgil knew."

"And we her comrades tried and true, No laurel crowns may weave. The magic circle broken is, For Kathleen fair we grieve."

After which, Amy led a procession of solemn-visaged, sombre-clad academic maidens, who approached the divan where Kit sat, and each presented her with some sage advice, in couplets. Amy explained later that she got the idea from Sargent's "Gifts of the Hours."

"Although, if it had been summer time, we would have tried to make it more like Tennyson's 'Princess,' but I think this carries the idea all right. Norma wrote the couplets, and they almost have a prophetic note. Don't you think so, Kit?"

Kit agreed that they did, and long afterwards, up in the old cupola council room, she read them aloud to Helen and some of the Gilead girls. One in particular rather hit her fancy, because Kit hated early rising.

"Rise, sweet maid, when the cock is crowing, If Fortune's bugles you'd be blowing."

The Saturday before they left was Kit's day for entertaining. Miss Daphne took the keenest delight in making it a success. There was a luncheon at one, followed by a whole afternoon of entertaining. Even the Dean emerged from his sanctum to mingle a little, and the "Jinx" declared she had never seen him so human before. He brought out the royal statuette of Annui and even the sacred memorial urn to show the girls. As Miss Daphne said afterwards, this showed what a friendly, benign mood he was in.

Kit was standing on the outskirts of the group around the old grand piano, where he had placed both antiques, when she suddenly saw, through the long French windows, Marcelle Beaubien coming up the drive. The Dean was deep in a happy, explanatory speech and she slipped away unnoticed by the rest.

"It was awfully nice of you to come, Marcelle," she exclaimed. "I've been watching for you ever since lunch. Why didn't you come earlier?"

"But I am early," smiled Marcelle. "It is only about three o'clock. Generally, I have to stay in all day Saturday, and give the boys a chance to go out. Will you write to me when you are away?"

"I'd love to. You know it's a queer thing, Marcelle, but really and truly, out of all the girls I have met here I feel better acquainted with you than with any of them."

Kit said this rather slowly, as if it were a sort of self-revelation which she had just discovered that minute. And yet it was true. She had enjoyed the class friendships at Hope immensely, but Marcelle had seemed to stand out from the rest of the girls as such a distinctly interesting personality. In a way, she was like Billie, because she loved nature and all the romance of adventure. There was in her nature the mingling of the three races, the French, the Indian, and the Scotch, and besides, Kit felt personally responsible for her success up at Hope. The girls had played absolutely fair and square, once they had decided to bury the hatchet, and given the chance, Marcelle herself had justified the opening of doors to her. As Amy said:

"It doth not behoove us to say a blessed word against Marcelle when she is racing ahead in all our classes, and plucking honors right and left."

Marcelle smiled at Kit's remark.

"I have heard my grandmother say that in her girlhood her people of the northern forests pledged their friendships by saying, 'While the grass grows and the waters run, so long shall we be friends.'" She turned and smiled at Kit her grave-eyed slow smile. "I will say that to you now, before you go."

Kit laid one arm around her shoulders.

"Me too," she answered, heartily. "Sounds like the blood brother vow they used to take."

They went up the steps together and into the long double parlors. The girls were singing at the piano while Amy played one class song after another, and the Dean hung broodingly over the urn. Kit thought she had never seen the house so full of life and happiness, and the look on Miss Daphne's face was one of positive radiance.

"You know," she said, confidentially to Kit, in a low voice, "after we return from the east, I have undertaken something that I know will do me good and the Dean, too. I've just been appointed head of the Junior Red Cross in Delphi, and the girls will meet here every Saturday. We shall miss you, Kit, but if it gives you any pleasure, my dear, to know it, I want to tell you it was your coming which opened my eyes to the folly of sitting with empty hands while there was work to be done. I don't think I can ever belong to what the Dean calls 'the rocking-chair squad' again, without a guilty conscience."

Kit hugged her fervently.

"Oh, but you're a dear, Aunt Daphne, to say such things. I only wish I could stay right here and be in two places at once. I'll tell you what I've learned here, organization." Kit said this very firmly and earnestly. "Back home they always said that I knew just what I wanted to do, but I didn't know how to do it. Well, I know what I want to do now. I want to go back home and organize."

Miss Daphne laughed and shook her head.

"Oh, Kit, child, do go easy," she said. "Organize yourself all you like, but be terribly careful how you start organizing other people's lives."

The girls had to leave early, as the Shakespearian entertainment was to happen that night up at Assembly Hall.

"Your very last chance to mingle, Kit," Norma called, as they all trooped out of the lower hall. "Don't lose your presence of mind to-night, when you find yourself in doublet and hose."

Kit stood on the veranda steps waving to them until they turned the corner of Maple Avenue.

"Oh, dear," she sighed, "I do wish that friendships lasted longer. I mean, I wish I could have all my friends here down in Gilead. You see, there us girls are all so scattered around on adjacent hilltops that it's hard to get together regularly. We've only got our hiking club. I think when I go back I'm going to start some more."

"The Dean wanted to have a little talk with you before dinner, dear. I think you'd better go in now, because we want to reach the Hall in good time for you to dress, and I'm going to have an early dinner. Don't talk too long. You know how he is when he gets absorbed in anything."

Kit promised and joined the Dean. He had carried back the statue of Annui and stood before it regarding it with perplexity. Kit slipped her arm through his. It seemed as though there had sprung up a new comradeship and understanding between them since their last talk.

"Won't he tell you his secrets, Uncle Cassius?" she asked. "He has such an aggravating smile, just as if he were amused at baffling you."

"I am baffled," the Dean conceded, genially. "I've reached a certain point and there there is a blank which no historic record seems to fill. I thought when I had restored the inscription on the urn that it would tell me several of the missing points, but it seems to be merely a sort of sacred invocation. I am amazed at the urn being hollow. Every other memorial urn which I found during our excavations in Egypt was sealed, and upon being opened we always found rolls of papyrii within. I am disappointed."