"Then we'd better go to town this very afternoon," Jennie cried, in haste, "and see if we can find three of baby blue shade. The stores will be drained of them by to-morrow."

"But to give—right—in!" wailed Helen, who dearly loved a fight.

"No. It isn't that. But, as the advertisements say: 'Eventually, so why not now?' We'll have to come to it. Let's get our tams while the tamming's good."

Helen could not see the reason for obeying the senior order; but she could see no reason, either, for not following her chum's lead. The three girls telephoned for a taxicab, which came to Dare Hall for them at half past three.

They were not the only girls going to town; but some of the freshmen, like Helen, wished to display their independence and refused—as yet—to obey the senior command.

A line at the bottom of the notice announced that three days were allowed the freshmen to obtain their proper tam-o'-shanters.

"Three days!" gasped Heavy, as they started off in the little car. "Why, it will take the stores in Greenburg two weeks to supply sufficient tams of the proper color."

"Then if we don't get ours," laughed Ruth, "we'd better go bareheaded until the new tams can be sent us from home."

"I won't do that!" cried the annoyed Helen. "Oh! oh!" she exclaimed, the next moment, and before they were out of the grounds. "See Miss Frayne! She has her scrambled-egg tam on."

"Don't you suppose she has read the notice?" worried Ruth.

"Why hasn't she?"

"Well, she seems to flock together with herself so much. Nobody seems to be chummy with her—yet," Ruth explained.

"Now, old Mother Worry!" exclaimed Helen, "bother about her, will you?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Ruth, demurely. "I shall, I suppose."

"Goodness, Ruth!" cried Jennie.

They discovered a rather strange thing when they arrived in Greenburg and entered the first store that dealt in ladies' apparel. Oh, yes, indeed! the proprietor had tam-o'-shanters of just the required shade, baby blue. The friends bought immediately for fear some of the other girls who had come to town would find these and buy the proprietor out.

And then, prone to the usual feminine frailty, they went "window shopping." And in every store seeking trade from the college girls they found the baby blue tam-o'-shanters.

"It's the most astonishing thing!" gasped Helen. "What do you suppose it means? Did you ever see so many caps of one kind and color in all your life?"

"It is amazing," agreed Ruth. Yet she was reflective.

Jennie began to laugh. "Wonder if the seniors are just helping out their friends among the tradespeople? It looks as though the storekeepers had bought a superabundance of baby blue caps and the seniors were putting it up to us to save the stores from bankruptcy."

Ruth, however, thought it must be something other than that. Was it that the storekeepers had been notified by the senior "powers that be" to be ready to supply a sudden large demand for tam-o'-shanters of that particular hue?

At least, one little Hebrew asked the three friends if they had already bought their tam-o'-shanters. "For vy, I haf a whole case of your class colors, ladies, that my poy iss opening."

"What class color?" demanded Helen, grumpily enough.

"Oh, Mees! A peau-ti-ful plue!"

"They're all doing it! They're all doing it!" murmured Jennie, staggering out of the "emporium." "This is going to affect my brain, girls. Did the seniors know the storekeepers had the tams in stock, or have the storekeepers been put wise by our elder sisters at Ardmore?"

"What's the odds?" finally laughed Helen, as they got into the waiting car. "We've got our tams. I only hope there are enough to go around."

The appearance of more than a score of baby-blue caps on the campus before evening showed that our trio of freshmen were not the only members of their class who considered it wise to obey the mandate of the lordly seniors, and without question.

The tempest in the teapot, however, continued to rage. Many girls declared they had not come to Ardmore to "be made monkeys of."

"No," May MacGreggor was heard to say. "Some of you were already assisted by nature. But get together, freshies! Can't you read the handwriting on the wall?"

"We can read the typewriting on the billboards," sniffed Helen Cameron. "Don't ask us to strain our eyesight farther."

Perhaps this was really the intention behind the senior order—that the entering girls should become more quickly riveted into a compact body. How the rooms occupied by the more popular freshmen buzzed during the next few days!

Our trio of friends, Ruth, Helen and Jennie, had been in danger of establishing a clique of three, if they had but known it. Now they were forced to extend their borders of acquaintanceship.

As they were three, and were usually seen about the study-room Ruth and Helen had established, it was natural that other girls of their class on that corridor of Dale Hall should flock to them. They thus became the nucleus at this side of the campus of the freshman class. From discussing the rule of the haughty seniors, the freshmen began to talk of their own organization and the approaching election.

Had Ruth allowed her friends to do so, there would have been started a boom by Helen and Jennie Stone for the girl of the Red Mill for president of the freshman class. This honor Ruth did not desire. There were several girls whom she had noted already among her mates, older than she, and who evidently possessed qualities for the position.

Besides, Ruth Fielding felt that if she became unduly prominent at first at Ardmore, girls like Edith Phelps would consider her a particularly bright target. She told herself again, but this time in private, that fame was not always an asset.



CHAPTER XI

THE ONE REBEL

However much the natural independence of the freshmen balked at the mandate promulgated by the seniors, baby-blue tam-o'-shanters grew more numerous every hour on the Ardmore campus.

The sophomores were evidently filled with glee; the juniors and seniors smiled significantly, but said nothing. The freshmen had been put in their place at once, it was considered. But the attack upon them had made the newcomers eager for an organization of their own.

"If we are going to be bossed this way—and it is disgraceful!—we must be prepared to withstand imposition," Helen announced.

So they began busily settling the matter of the organization of the class and the choosing of its officers. Before these matters were arranged completely, however, there was an incident of note.

The freshmen, as a body, were invited to attend a sophomore "roar." It was to be the first out-of-door "roar" of the year and occurred right after classes and lectures one afternoon. The two lower classes scamped their gymnasium work to make it a success.

Now, a "roar" at Ardmore was much nicer than it sounds. It was merely an open-air singing festival, and this one was for the purpose of making the freshmen familiar with the popular songs of the college.

Professor Leidenburg, the musical director, himself led the outdoor concert. The sophomores stood in a compact body before the main entrance to the college hall. Massed in the background, and in a half circle, were the freshmen.

The weather had become cool and all the girls wore their tam-o'-shanters. For the first time it was noticeable how pretty the pale blue caps on the freshmen's heads looked. And the new girls likewise noted that most of the tam-o'-shanters worn-by their sophomore hostesses were pale yellow.

It was whispered then (and strange none of the freshmen had discovered it before) that the class preceding theirs at Ardmore—the present sophomores—had been forced to wear caps of a distinctive color, too. These pale yellow ones were their old caps, left over from the previous winter.

The open-air assemblages of the college were made more attractive by this scheme of a particular class color in head-wear.

There was a blot in the assembly of the freshmen on this occasion. It was not discovered in the beginning. Soon, however, there was much whispering, and looking about and pointing.

"Do you see that?" gasped Jennie, who had been straining her neck and hopping up and down on her toes to see what the other girls were looking at.

"What are you rubbering at, Heavy?" demanded Helen, inelegantly.

"Yes; what's all the disturbance?" asked Ruth.

"That girl!" ejaculated the fleshy one.

"What girl now? Any particular girl?"

"She's not very particular, I guess," returned Jennie, "or she wouldn't do it."

"Jennie!" demanded Helen. "Who do what?"

"That Frayne girl," explained her plump friend.

Rebecca Frayne stood well back in the lines of freshmen. It could not be said that she thrust herself forward, or sought to gain the attention of the crowd. Nevertheless, among the mass of pale blue tam-o'-shanters, her parti-colored one was very prominent.

"Goodness!" gasped Ruth. "Doesn't she know better?"

"Do you suppose she is one of those stubborn girls who just 'won't be driv'?" giggled Helen.

It was no laughing matter. The three days of grace written upon the seniors' order regarding the caps had now passed. There seemed no good reason for one member of the freshman class to refuse to obey the command. Indeed, they had all tacitly agreed to do as they were told—upon this single point, at least.

"There certainly are enough of them left in town so that she can buy one," Jennie Stone said.

"Goodness!" snapped Helen. "If my complexion can stand such a silly color, hers certainly can."

Before the out-of-doors concert was over, news of this rebellion on the part of a single freshman had run through the crowd like a breath of wind over ripe wheat. It almost broke up the "roar."

As the last verse of the last song was ended and the company began to disperse, the freshmen themselves, and the sophomores as well, stared at Rebecca Frayne in open wonder. She started for her room, which was in Dare Hall on the same corridor as that of the three girls from Briarwood, and Ruth and Helen and Jennie were right behind her.

"That certainly is an awful tam," groaned Jennie. "What do you suppose makes her wear it, anyway? Let alone the trouble——"

She broke off. Miss Dexter, the first senior who had spoken to Ruth and Helen coming over from the railway station on the auto-bus, stopped the strange girl whose initials were the same as those of the girl of the Red Mill.

"Will you tell me, please, why you are wearing that tam-o'-shanter?" asked Miss Dexter.

Rebecca Frayne's head came up and a spot of vivid red appeared in either of her sallow cheeks.

"Is that your business?" she demanded, slowly.

"Do you know that I am a senior?" asked Miss Dexter, levelly.

"I don't care if you are two seniors," returned Rebecca Frayne, saucily.

Miss Dexter turned her back upon the freshman and walked promptly away. The listeners were appalled. None of them cared to go forward and speak to Rebecca Frayne.

"Cracky!" gasped Helen. "She's an awful spitfire."

"She's an awful chump!" groaned Jennie. "The seniors won't do a thing to her!"

But nothing came at once of Rebecca's refusal to obey the seniors' command regarding tam-o'-shanters. It was known, however, that the executive committees of both the senior and junior classes met that next night and supposedly took the matter up.

"Oh, no! They don't haze any more at Ardmore," said Jennie, shaking her head. "But just wait!"



CHAPTER XII

RUTH IS NOT SATISFIED

Ruth Fielding was not at all satisfied. Not that her experiences in these first few weeks of college were not wholly "up to sample," as the slangy Jennie Stone remarked. Ruth was getting personally all out of college life that she could expect.

The mere fact that a little handful of the girls looked at her somewhat askance because of her success as a motion picture writer, did not greatly trouble the girl of the Red Mill. She could wait for them to forget her small "fame" or for them to learn that she was quite as simple and unaffected as any other girl of her age. It was about Rebecca Frayne that Ruth was disturbed in her mind. Here was the case of a student who, Ruth believed, was much misunderstood.

She could not imagine a girl deliberately making trouble for herself. Rebecca Frayne by the expenditure of a couple of dollars in the purchase of a new tam-o'-shanter might have easily overcome this dislike that had been bred not alone in the minds of the girls of the two upper classes, but among the sophomores and her own classmates as well. The sophomores thought her ridiculous; the freshmen themselves felt that she was bringing upon the whole class unmerited criticism.

Ruth looked deeper. She saw the strange girl walk past her mates unnoticed, scarcely spoken to, indeed, by the freshmen and ignored completely by members of the other classes. And yet, to Ruth's mind, there seemed to be an air about Rebecca Frayne—a look in her eyes, perhaps—that seemed to beg for sympathy.

It was no hardship for Ruth to speak to the girl and try to be friendly with her. But opportunities for this were not frequent.

In the first place Ruth's own time was much occupied with her studies, her own personal friends, Helen and Jennie, and the new scenario on which she worked during every odd hour.

Several times Ruth went to the door of Rebecca's room and knocked. She positively knew the girl was at home, but there had been no answer to her summons and the door was locked.

The situation troubled Ruth. When she was among her classmates, Rebecca seemed nervously anxious to please and eager to be spoken to, although she had little to say. Here, on the other hand, once alone in her room, she deliberately shut herself away from all society.

Soon after the outdoor song festival that had been so successful, and immediately following the organization of the freshman class and its election of officers, Ruth and Helen went over to the library one evening to consult some reference books.

The reference room was well filled with busy girls of all classes, who came bustling in, got down the books they required, dipped into them for a minute and then departed to their own studies, or else settled down to work on their topics for a more extended period.

It was a cold evening, and whenever a girl entered from the hall a breath of frosty air came with her, and most of those gathered in the room were likely to look up and shiver. Few of those assembled failed to notice Rebecca Frayne when she came in.

"Goodness! See who has came," whispered Helen.

"Oh, Rebecca!" murmured Ruth, looking up as the girl in question crossed the room.

"Hasn't she the cheek of all cheeks to breeze in here this way?" Helen went on to say with more force than elegance. "That awful tam again."

One could not fail to see the tam-o'-shanter very well. It was noticeable in any assembly.

Perhaps half of the girls in the reference room were seniors and juniors. Several of the members of the younger classes nodded to the newcomer, though not many noticed her in this way.

There was, however, almost immediately a general movement by the girls belonging to the senior and junior classes. They got up grimly, put away the books they were at work upon, and filed out, one by one, and without saying a word.

Helen stared after them, and nudged Ruth.

"What is it?" asked her chum, who had been too busy to notice.

"Did you see that?" asked Helen.

"Did I see what?"

"There isn't a senior or a jun left in the room. That—that's something more than a coincidence."

Ruth was puzzled. "I really wish you would explain," she said.

Helen was not the only girl remaining who had noticed the immediate departure of the members of the two older classes. Some of the sophomores were whispering together. Rebecca's fellow-classmen glanced at her sharply to see if she had noticed what had occurred.

"I can't believe it," Ruth said worriedly, after Helen explained. "They would not go out because she came in."

The next day, however, the matter was more marked. Rebecca could sing; she evidently loved singing. In the classes for vocal music there was often a mixture of all grades, some of the seniors and juniors attending with the sophomores and freshmen.

Ruth Fielding, of course, never missed these classes. She hoped to be noticed and have her voice tried out for the Glee Club. Professor Leidenburg was to give a little talk on this day that would be helpful, and the class was well attended.

But when Rebecca Frayne came into the small hall just before the professor himself appeared, there was a stir throughout the audience. The girls, of course, were hatless here; but that morning Rebecca had been seen wearing the "scrambled-egg tam," as Helen insisted upon calling it.

There was an intake of breath all over the room. Rebecca walked down the aisle in search of an empty seat.

And suddenly half the seats were empty. She could have her choice—and a large one.

"Goodness!" Helen gasped.

Every senior and junior in the room had arisen and had left her seat. Not a word had been spoken, nor had they glanced at Rebecca Frayne, who at first was unaware of what it portended.

The older girls filed out silently. Professor Leidenburg entered by the door beside the organ just in time to see the last of them disappear. He looked a bit surprised, but said nothing and took up the matter at hand with but half an audience.

Rebecca Frayne had seen and understood at last. She sat still in her seat, and Ruth saw that she did not open her lips when, later, the choruses were sung. Her face was very pale.

Nobody spoke to her when the class was dismissed. This was not an intentional slight on the part of her mates; simply, the girls did not know what to say.

The seniors and juniors were showing Rebecca that she was taboo. Their attitude could not be mistaken. And so great was the influence of these older girls of Ardmore upon the whole college that Rebecca walked entirely alone.

Ruth and Helen walked down the hill behind Rebecca that afternoon. Ruth was very silent, while Helen buzzed about a dozen things.

"I—I wonder how that poor girl feels?" murmured the girl of the Red Mill after a while.

"Cold, I imagine!" declared her chum, vigorously. "I'm half frozen myself, Ruth. There's going to be a big frost to-night and the lake is already skimmed over. Say, Ruth!"

"Well?" asked her friend, absently.

"Let's take our skates first thing in the morning down to that man who sharpens things at the boathouse; will you?"



CHAPTER XIII

THE GIRL IN THE STORM

Ruth Fielding was quite as eager for fun between lessons as either Helen or Jennie, and the prospect of skating on such a large lake as Remona delighted her. The second day following the incident in the chorus class, the ice which had bound Lake Remona was officially pronounced safe.

Gymnasium athletics lost their charm for those girls who were truly active and could skate. There were luxurious damsels who preferred to be pushed about in ice-chairs by more active girls or by hired attendants; but our trio of friends did not look upon that as enjoyment.

Even Jennie Stone was a vigorous skater. After a day or two on the ice, when their ankles had become strong enough, the three made a circuit of Bliss Island—and that was "some skate," to quote Jennie.

The island was more than a mile from the boathouse, and it was five or six miles in circumference. Therefore, the task was quite all of an eight-mile jaunt.

"But 'do or die' is our motto," remarked Helen, as they set forth on this determined journey. "Let's show these pussy girls what it means to have trained at Briarwood."

"That's all right! that's all right!" grumbled Jennie. "But your motto is altogether too grim and significant. Let's limit it. I want to do if I can; but mercy me! I don't want to die yet. You girls have got to stop and rest when I say so, or I won't go at all."

Ruth and Helen agreed. That is why it took them until almost dinner-time to encircle the island. Jennie Stone was determined to rest upon the least provocation.

"We'll be starved to death before we get back," Helen began to complain while they were upon the south side of the island. "I should think you would feel the pinch of privation, Heavy."

"I do," admitted the other hollowly.

"Well, why didn't you escape it by refusing to come, or else by bringing a lunch?" demanded the black-eyed girl.

"No. This is a part of the system," groaned Jennie.

"What system, I'd like to know?" Ruth asked, in surprise.

"System of martyrdom, I guess," sniffed Helen.

"You've said it," agreed the plump girl. "That is the truest word yet spoken. Martyrdom! that is what it means for me."

"What means to you?" snapped Helen, exasperated because she could not understand.

"This dieting and exercising," Jennie said more cheerfully. "I deliberately came so far and without food to see if I couldn't really lose some weight. Do you know, girls, I am so hollow and so tired right now, that I believe I must have lost a few ounces, anyway."

"You ridiculous thing!" laughed Helen, recovering her good nature.

"Should we sacrifice ourselves for your benefit, do you think, Jennie?" Ruth asked.

"Why not? 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' only more so. I need the inspiration of you girls to help me," Jennie declared. "Do you know, sometimes I am almost discouraged?"

"About what?" asked Helen.

"About my weight. I watch the bathroom scales with eagle eye. But instead of coming down by pounds, I only fall by ounces. It is awfully discouraging. And then," added the fleshy girl, "the other day when we had such a scrumptuous dinner—was it Columbus Day? I believe so—I was tempted to eat one of my old-time 'full and plenty' meals, and what do you think?"

"You had the nightmare," said Helen.

"Not a chance! But I went up two pounds and a half—or else the scales were crazy!"

"Girls!" exclaimed Ruth, suddenly. "Do you know it is snowing?"

"My! I never expected that," cried Helen, as a feathery flake lit upon the very point of her pretty nose. "Ow!"

"Well, we'd better go on, I guess," Ruth observed. "Put your best foot forward, please, Miss Jennie."

"I don't know which is my best foot now," complained the heavy girl. "They are both getting lame."

"We'll just have to make you sit down on the ice while we drag you," announced Helen, increasing the length of her stroke.

"Not much you won't!" exclaimed Jennie Stone, "I'm cold enough as it is."

"Shall we take off our skates and walk over the island, girls?" suggested Ruth. "That will save some time and more than a little work for Heavy."

"Don't worry about me," put in Jennie. "I need the exercise. And walking would be worse than skating, I do believe."

It was snowing quite thickly now; but the shore of the island was not far away. The trio hugged it closely in encircling the wooded and hilly piece of land.

"Say!" Helen cried, "we're not the only girls out here to-day."

"Huh?" grunted Jennie, head down and skating doggedly.

"See there, Ruth!" called the black-eyed girl.

Ruth turned her face to one side and looked under the shade of her hand, which she held above her eyes. There was a figure moving along the shore of Bliss Island just abreast of them.

"It's a girl," she said. "But she's not skating."

"Who is it? A freshie?" asked Jennie, but little interested.

Ruth did not reply. She seemed wonderfully interested by the appearance of the girl on shore. She fell behind her mates while she watched the figure.

The snow was increasing; and that with the abruptly rising island, furnished a background for the strange girl which threw her into relief.

At first Ruth was attracted only by her figure. She could not see her face.

"Who can she be? Not one of the girls at Dare Hall——"

This idea spun to nothingness very quickly. No! The figure ashore reminded Ruth Fielding of nobody whom she had seen recently. The feeling, however, that she knew the person grew.

The snow blew sharply into the faces of the skating girls; but she on shore was somewhat sheltered from the gale. The wind was out of the north and west and the highland of the island broke the zest of the gale for the strange girl.

"And yet she isn't strange—I know she isn't," murmured Ruth Fielding, casting another glance back at the figure on the shore.

"Come on, Ruth! Do hurry!" cried Helen, looking back. "Even Heavy is beating you."

Ruth quickened her efforts. The strange girl disappeared, mounting a path it seemed toward the center of the island. Ruth, head bent and lips tightly closed, skated on intent upon her mystifying thoughts.

The trio rounded the island at last. They got the wind somewhat at their backs and on a long slant made for the boathouse landing. It was growing dusk, but there was a fire at the landing that beckoned them on.

"Glad it isn't any farther," Helen panted. "This snow is gathering so fast it clogs one's skates."

"Oh, I must be losing pounds!" puffed Jennie Stone. "I bet none of my clothes will fit me to-morrow. I shall have to throw them all away."

"Oh, Heavy!" giggled Helen. "That lovely new silk?"

"Oh—well—I shall take that in!" drawled Jennie.

"I've got it!" exclaimed Ruth, in a most startling way.

"Goodness me! are you hurt?" demanded Helen.

"What you got? A cramp?" asked Jennie, quite as solicitous.

"I know now who that girl looked like," declared Ruth.

"What girl?" rejoined Helen Cameron. "The one over yonder, on the other side of the island?"

"Yes. She looks just like that Maggie who came to the mill, Helen. You remember, don't you? The girl I left to help Aunt Alvirah when I came to college."

"Well, for the land's sake!" said Jennie Stone. "If she's up there at the Red Mill, how can she possibly be down here, too? You're talking out of order, Miss Fielding. Sit down!"



CHAPTER XIV

"OFT IN THE STILLY NIGHT"

Ruth Fielding could not get that surprising, that almost unbelievable, discovery out of her mind.

It seemed ridiculous to think that girl could be Maggie, "the waif," she had seen on Bliss Island. Aunt Alvirah had written Ruth a letter only a few days before and in it she said that Maggie was very helpful and seemed wholly content.

"Only," the little old housekeeper at the Red Mill wrote, "I don't know a mite more about the child now than I did when Mr. Tom Cameron and our Ben brought her in, all white and fainty-like."

The girls had to hurry on or be late to dinner. But the very first thing Ruth did when she reached their rooms in Dare Hall was to look up Aunt Alvirah's letter and see when it was dated and mailed.

"It's obvious," Ruth told herself, "that Maggie could have reached here almost as soon as the letter if she had wished to. But why come at all? If it was Maggie over on that island, why was she there?"

Of course, these ruminations were all in private. Ruth knew better than to take her two close friends into her confidence. If she did the mystery would have been the chief topic of conversation after dinner, instead of the studies slated for that evening.

An incident occurred, however, at dinner which served to take Ruth's mind, too, from the mystery. There were a number of seniors and juniors quartered at Dare Hall. Nor were all the seniors table-captains at dinner.

This evening the dining hall had filled early. Perhaps the brisk air and their outdoor exercise had given the girls sharper appetites than usual. It had the three girls from Briarwood. They were wearied after their long skate around the island and as ravenous as wolves. They could scarcely wait for Miss Comstock, at the head of their particular table, to begin eating so they might do so, too.

And just at this moment, as the pleasant bustle of dinner began, and the lightly tripping waitresses were stepping hither and yon with their trays, the door opened and a single belated girl entered the dining hall.

As though the entrance of this girl were expected, a hush fell over the room. Everybody but Jennie looked up, their soup spoons poised as they watched Rebecca Frayne walk down the long room to her place at the housekeeper's table.

"Sh!" hissed Helen, admonishing Jennie Stone.

"What's the matter?" demanded the fleshy girl in surprise. "Is my soup noisy? I'll have to train it better."

But nobody laughed. All eyes were fastened on the girl who had made herself so obnoxious to the seniors and the juniors of Ardmore. She sat down and a waitress put her soup before her. Before poor Rebecca could lift her spoon there was a stir all over the room. Every senior and junior (and there were more than half a hundred in the dining hall) arose, save those acting as table-captains or monitors. The rustle of their rising was subdued; they murmured their excuses to the heads of their several tables in a perfectly polite manner; and not a glance from their eyes turned toward Rebecca Frayne. But as they walked out of the dining hall, their dinners scarcely tasted, the slight put upon the freshman who would not obey was too direct and obvious to be mistaken.

Even Jennie Stone was at length aroused from her enjoyment of the very good soup.

"What do you know about that?" she demanded of Ruth and Helen.

Ruth said not a word. To tell the truth she felt so sorry for Rebecca Frayne that she lost taste for her own meal, hungry though she had been when she sat down.

How Rebecca herself felt could only be imagined. She had already shown herself to be a painful mixture of sensitiveness and carelessness of criticism that made Ruth Fielding, at least, wonder greatly.

Now she ate her dinner without seeming to observe the attitude the members of the older classes had taken.

"Cracky!" murmured Jennie, in the middle of dinner. "She's got all the best of it—believe me! The seniors and the juns go hungry."

"For a principle," snapped the girl beside her, who chanced to be a sophomore.

"Well," said Jennie, smiling, "principles are far from filling. They're a good deal like the only part of the doughnut that agreed with the dyspeptic—the hole. Please pass the bread, dear. Somebody must have eaten mine—and it was nicely buttered, too."

"Goodness! nothing disturbs your calm, does it, Miss Stone?" cried another girl.

Few of the girls in the dining hall, however, could keep their minds or their gaze off Rebecca Frayne. In whispers all through the meal she was discussed by her close neighbors. Girls at tables farther away talked of the situation frankly.

And the consensus of opinion was against her. It was the general feeling that she was entirely in the wrong. The very law which she had essayed to flaunt was that which had brought the freshmen together as a class, and was welding them into a homogeneous whole.

"She's a goose!" exclaimed Helen Cameron.

And perhaps this was true. It did look foolish. Yet Ruth felt that there must be some misunderstanding back of it all. It should be explained. The girl could not go on in this way.

"First we know she'll be packing up and leaving Ardmore," Ruth said worriedly.

"She'll leave nobody in tears, I guess," declared one girl within hearing.

"But she's one of us—she's a freshman!" Ruth murmured.

"She doesn't seem to desire our company or friendship," said another and more thoughtful girl.

"And she won't pack up in a hurry," drawled Jennie, still eating. "Remember all those bags and that enormous trunk she brought?"

"But, say," began Helen, slowly, "where are all the frocks and things she was supposed to bring with her? We supposed she'd be the peacock of the class, and I don't believe I've seen her in more than three different dresses and only two hats, including that indescribably brilliant tam."

Ruth said nothing. She was thinking. She planned to get out of the dining hall at the same time Rebecca did, but just as the dessert was being passed the odd girl rose quickly, bowed her excuses to the housekeeper, and almost ran out of the hall.

"She was crying!" gasped Ruth, feeling both helpless and sympathetic.

"I wager she bit her tongue, then," remarked Jennie.

Ruth hurried through her dessert and left the dining hall ahead of most of the girls. She glanced through the long windows and saw that it was still snowing.

"I wonder if that girl is over on the island yet?" she reflected as she ran upstairs.

Her first thought just then was of an entirely different girl. She went to Rebecca's door and knocked. She knocked twice, then again. But no answer was returned. No light came through the keyhole, or from under the door; yet Ruth felt sure that Rebecca Frayne was in the room, and weeping. It was a situation in which Ruth Fielding longed to help, yet there seemed positively nothing she could do as long as the stubborn girl would not meet her half way. With a sigh she went to the study she and Helen jointly occupied.

Before switching on the light she went to one of the windows that looked out on the lake. Bliss Island was easily visible from this point. The snow was still falling, but not heavily enough to obstruct her vision much. The white bulk of the island rose in the midst of the field of snow-covered ice. It seemed nearer than it ordinarily appeared.

As Ruth gazed she saw a spark of light on the island, high up from the shore, but evidently among the trees, for it was intermittent. Now it was visible and again only a red glow showed there. She was still gazing upon this puzzling light when Helen opened the door.

"Hello, Ruthie!" she cried. "All in the dark? Oh! isn't the outside world beautiful to-night?"

She came to the window and put her arm about Ruth's waist.

"See how solemnly the snow is falling—and the whole world is white," murmured the black-eyed girl. "'Oft in the stilly night'——Or is it 'Oft in the silly night'?" and she laughed, for it was not often nor for long that the sentiment that lay deep in Helen's heart rose to the surface. "Oh! What's that light over there, Ruth?" she added, with quick apprehension.

"That is what I have been looking at," Ruth said.

"But you don't tell me what it is!" cried Helen.

"Because I don't know. But I suspect."

"Suspect what?"

"That it is a campfire," said Ruth. "Yes. It seems to be in one spot. Only the wind makes the flames leap, and at one time they are plainly visible while again they are partly obscured."

"Who ever would camp over on Bliss Island on a night like this?" gasped Helen.

"I don't see why you put such mysteries up to me," returned Ruth, with a shrug. "I'm no prophet. But——"

"But what?"

"Do you remember that girl we saw on the island this afternoon?"

"Goodness! Yes."

"Well, mightn't it be she, or a party she may be with?"

"Campers on the island in a snow storm? No girls from this college would be so silly," Helen declared.

"I'm not at all sure she was an Ardmore girl," said Ruth, reflectively.

"Who under the sun could she be, then?"

"Almost anybody else," laughed Ruth. "It is going to stop snowing altogether soon, Helen. See! the moon is breaking through the clouds."

"It will be lovely out," sighed Helen. "But hard walking."

Ruth gestured towards their two pairs of snowshoes crossed upon the wall. "Not on those," she said.

"Oh, Ruthie! Would you?"

"All we have to do is to tighten them and sally forth."

"Gracious! I'd be willing to be Sally Fifth for a spark of fun," declared Helen, eagerly.

"How about Heavy?" asked Ruth, as Helen hastened to take down the snowshoes which both girls had learned to use years before at Snow Camp, in the Adirondacks.

"Dead to the world already, I imagine," laughed Helen. "I saw her to her room, and I believe she was so tired and so full of dinner that she tumbled into bed almost before she got her clothes off. You'd never get her out on such a crazy venture!"

Helen was as happy as a lark over the chance of "fun." The two girls skilfully tightened the stringing of the shoes, and then, having put on coats, mittens, and drawn the tam-o'-shanters down over their ears, they crept out of their rooms and hastened downstairs and out of the dormitory building.

There was not a moving object in sight upon the campus or the sloping white lawns to the level of the frozen lake. The two chums thrust their toes into the straps of their snowshoes and set forth.



CHAPTER XV

AN ODD ADVENTURE

Six inches or more of snow had fallen. It was feathery and packed well under the snowshoes. The girls sank about two inches into the fleecy mass and there the shoes made a complete bed for themselves and the weight of their wearers.

"You know what I'd love to do this winter?" said Helen, as they trudged on.

"What, my dear?" asked Ruth, who seemed much distraught.

"I'd like to try skiing. The slope of College Hill would be just splendiferous for that! Away from the observatory to the lake—and then some!"

"We'll start a skiing club among the freshies," Ruth said, warmly accepting the idea. "Wonder nobody has thought of it before."

"Ardmore hasn't waked up yet to all its possibilities," said Helen, demurely. "But this umpty-umph class of freshmen will show the college a thing or two before we pass from out its scholastic halls."

"Question!" cried Ruth, laughing. Then: "There! you can see that light again."

"Goodness! You're never going over to that island?" cried Helen.

"What did we come out for?" asked Ruth. "And scamp our study hour?"

"Goodness!" cried Helen, again, "just for fun."

"Well, it may be fun to find out just who built that fire and what for," said Ruth.

"And then again," objected her chum, "it may be no fun at all, but serious."

"I have a serious reason for finding out—if I can," Ruth declared.

"What is it, dear?"

"I'll tell you later," said Ruth. "Follow me now."

"If I do I'll not wear diamonds, and I may get into trouble," objected Helen.

"You've never got into very serious trouble yet by following my leadership," laughed Ruth. "Come on, Fraid-cat."

"Ain't! But we don't know who is over there. Just to think! A camp in the snow!"

"Well, we have camped in the snow ourselves," laughed Ruth, harking back to an adventure at Snow Camp that neither of them would ever be likely to forget.

They scuffed along on the snowshoes, soon reaching the edge of the lake. Nobody was about the boathouse, for the ice would have to be swept and scraped by the horse-drawn machines before the girls could go skating again.

The moon was pushing through the scurrying clouds, and the snow had ceased falling.

"Look back!" crowed Helen. "Looks as though two enormous animals had come down the hillside, doesn't it?"

"The girls will wake up and view our tracks with wonder in the morning," said Ruth, with a smile. "Perhaps they'll think that some curious monsters have visited Ardmore."

"That would cause more wonderment than the case of Rebecca Frayne. What do you suppose is finally going to happen to that foolish girl?"

"I really cannot guess," Ruth returned, shaking her head sadly. "Poor thing!"

"Why! she can't be poor," gasped Helen. "Look at all those trunks she brought with her to Ardmore. And her dresses are tremendously fancy—although we've not seen many of them yet."

Ruth stared at her chum for a moment without replying. It was right there and then that she came near to guessing the secret of Rebecca Frayne's trouble. But she forbore to say anything about it at the time, and went on beside her chum toward the white island, much disturbed in her mind.

Now and then they caught sight of the dancing flames of the campfire. But when they were nearer the island, the hill was so steep that they lost sight completely of the light.

"Suppose it's a man?" breathed Helen, suddenly, as they began to climb the shore of Bliss Island.

"He won't eat us," returned Ruth.

"No. They don't often. Only cannibals, and they are not prevalent in this locality," giggled Helen. "But if it is a man——"

"Then we'll turn around and go back," said Ruth, coolly. "I haven't come out here to get acquainted with any male person."

"Bluie! Suppose he's a real nice boy?"

"There's no such an animal," laughed Ruth. "That is, not around here at the present moment."

"Oh yes. I see," Helen rejoined drily. "The nearest nice one is at the Seven Oaks Military Academy."

"So you say," Ruth said demurely. "But if it were Tom?"

"Dear old Tom and some of his chums!" cried Helen. "Wouldn't it be great? This Adamless Eden is rather palling on me, Chum. The other girls have visitors, but our friends are too far away."

"Hush!" advised Ruth. "Whoever it is up there will hear you."

Helen was evidently not at all enamored of this adventure. She lagged behind a little. Yet she would not allow Ruth to go on alone to interview the mysterious camper.

"I tell you what," the black-eyed girl said, after a moment and in a whisper. "I believe that fire is up near the big boulder we looked at—you remember? The Stone Face, do they call it?"

"Quite possibly," Ruth rejoined briskly. "Come on if you're coming. I'm sure the Stone Face won't hurt us."

"Not unless it falls on us," giggled Helen.

The grove of big trees that covered this part of the hillside was open, and the chums very easily made their way toward the fire, even on snowshoes. But the shoes naturally made some noise as they scuffed over the snow, and in a minute Ruth stopped and slipped her feet out of the straps, motioning Helen to do the same. They wore overshoes so there was no danger of their getting their feet wet in the snow.

Hand in hand, Ruth and Helen crept forward. They saw the fire flickering just before them. There was a single figure between the fire and the very boulder of which Helen had spoken.

Reaching the edge of the grove the girls gazed without discovery at the camp in the snow. The boulder stood in a small open space, and it was so high and bulky that it sheltered the fire and the camper quite comfortably. As Ruth had suspected, the latter was the girl she had seen walking upon the southern shore of Bliss Island. She knew her by her figure, if not by her face, which was at the moment hidden.

"She's alone," whispered Helen, making the words with her lips more than with her voice.

"What can she be doing out here?" was the black-eyed girl's next demand.

Her chum put out a hand in a gesture of warning and at once walked out of the shelter of the trees and approached the fire. Helen lingered behind. After all, it was so strange a situation that she did not feel very courageous.

The moon had quite broken through the clouds now and as Ruth drew nearer to the fire and the girl, her shadow was projected before her upon the snow. The girl who looked like Maggie suddenly espied this shadow, raised her head, and leaped up with a cry.

"Don't be frightened, Maggie," said Ruth. "It's only us two girls."

"My—my name is—isn't Maggie," stammered the strange girl.

And sure enough, having once seen her closely, Ruth Fielding saw that she was quite wrong in her identification. This was not the girl who had drifted down the Lumano River to the Red Mill and taken refuge with Aunt Alvirah.

This was a much more assertive person than Maggie—a girl with plenty of health, both of body and mind. Maggie impressed one as being mentally or nervously deficient. Not so this girl who was camping here in the snow on Bliss Island. Yet there was a resemblance to Maggie in the figure of the stranger, and Ruth noted a resemblance in her features, too.

"My goodness me!" she said, laughing pleasantly. "If you're not our Maggie you look near enough like her to be her sister."

"Well, I haven't any sister in that college," said the strange girl, shortly. "You're from Ardmore, aren't you?"

"Yes," Ruth said, Helen now having joined them. "And we saw your light——"

"My what?" demanded the camping girl, who was warmly, though plainly dressed.

"Your campfire. You see," explained Ruth, finding it rather difficult after all to talk to this very self-possessed girl, "we skated around the island to-day——"

"I saw you," said the stranger gruffly. "There were three of you."

"Yes. And I thought you looked like Maggie, then."

"Isn't this Maggie one of you?" sharply demanded the stranger.

"She's a girl whom—whom I know," Ruth said quickly. "A really nice girl. And you do look like her. Doesn't she, Helen?"

"Why—yes—something like," drawled Helen.

"And did you have to come out here to see if I were your friend?" asked the other girl.

"When I saw the campfire—yes," Ruth admitted. "It seemed so strange, you know."

"What seemed strange?" demanded the girl, very tartly. It was plain that she considered their visit an intrusion.

"Why, think of it yourself," Ruth cried, while Helen sniffed audibly. "A girl camping alone on this island—and in a snowstorm."

"It isn't snowing now," said the girl, smiling grimly.

"But it was when we saw the fire at first," Ruth hastened to say. "You know yourself you would be interested."

"Not enough to come clear out here—must be over a mile!—to see about it," was the rejoinder. "I usually mind my own business."

"So do we, you may be sure!" spoke up Helen, quick to take offence. "Come away, Ruth."

But the girl of the Red Mill was not at all satisfied. She said, frankly:

"I do wish that you would tell us why you are here? Surely, you won't remain all night in this lonely place? There is nobody else on the island, is there?"

"I should hope not!" exclaimed the girl. "Only you two busybodies."

"But, really, we came because we were interested in what went on here. It seems so strange for a girl, alone——"

"You've said that before," was the dry reply. "I am a girl alone. I am here on my own business. And that isn't yours."

"Oh!" ejaculated Helen, angrily.

"Well, if you don't like being spoken to plainly, you needn't stay," the strange girl flung at her.

"I see that very well," returned Helen, tossing her head. "Do come away, Ruth."

"Ha!" exclaimed the strange girl, suddenly looking at Ruth more intently. "Are you called Ruth?"

"Yes. Ruth Fielding is my name."

"Oh!" and the girl's face changed in its expression and a little flush came into her cheeks. "I've—I've heard of you."

"Indeed! How?" cried Ruth, eagerly. She felt that this girl must really have some connection with Maggie at the mill, she looked so much like the waif.

"Oh," said the other girl slowly, looking away, "I heard you wrote picture plays. I saw one of them. That's all."

Ruth was silent for a moment. Helen kept tugging at her arm and urging her to go.

"We—we can do nothing for you?" queried the girl of the Red Mill at last.

"You can get off the island—that's as much as I care," said the strange girl, with a harsh laugh. "You're only intruding where you're not wanted."

"Well, I do declare!" burst out Helen again. "She is the most impolite thing. Do come away, Ruthie."

"We really came with the best intentions," Ruth added, as she turned away with her chum. "It—it doesn't look right for a girl to be alone at a campfire on this island—and at night, too."

"I sha'n't stay here all night," the girl said shortly. "You needn't fret. If you want to know, I just built the fire to get warm by before I started back."

"Back where?" Ruth could not help asking.

"That you don't know—and you won't know," returned the strange girl, and turned her back upon them.



CHAPTER XVI

WHAT WAS IN REBECCA'S TRUNK

The two chums did not speak a word to each other until they had recovered their snowshoes and set out down the rough side of Bliss Island for the ice. Then Helen sputtered:

"People like that! Did you ever see such a person? I never was so insulted——"

"Pshaw! She was right—in a way," Ruth said coolly. "We had no real business to pry into her affairs."

"Well!"

"I got you into it. I'm sorry," the girl of the Red Mill said. "I thought it really was Maggie, or I wouldn't have come over here."

"She's something like that Maggie girl," proclaimed Helen. "She was nice, I thought."

"Maybe this girl is nice, taken under other circumstances," laughed Ruth. "I really would like to know what she is over here for."

"No good, I'll be bound," said the pessimistic Helen.

"And another thing," Ruth went on to say, as she and her chum reached the level of the frozen lake, "did you notice that pick handle?"

"That what?" demanded Helen, in amazement.

"Pickaxe handle—I believe it was," Ruth said thoughtfully. "It was thrust out of the snow pile she had scraped away from the boulder. And, moreover, the ground looked as though it had been dug into."

"Why, the ground is as hard as the rock itself," Helen cried. "There are six or eight inches of frost right now."

"I guess that's so," agreed Ruth. "Perhaps that's why she built such a big fire."

"What do you mean, Ruth Fielding?" cried her chum.

"I think she wanted to dig there for something," Ruth replied reflectively. "I wonder what for?"

When they had returned to Dare Hall and had got their things off and were warm again, they looked out of the window. The campfire on the island had died out.

"She's gone away, of course," sighed Ruth. "But I would like to know what she was there for."

"One of the mysteries of life," said Helen, as she made ready for bed. "Dear me, but I'm tired!"

She was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. Not so Ruth. The latter lay awake some time wondering about the odd girl on the island and her errand there.

Ruth Fielding had another girl's troubles on her mind, however—and a girl much closer to her. The girl on the island merely teased her imagination. Rebecca Frayne's difficulties seemed much more important to Ruth.

Of course, there was no real reason for Ruth to take up cudgels for her odd classmate. Indeed, she did not feel that she could do that, for she was quite convinced that Rebecca Frayne was wrong. Nevertheless, she was very sorry for the girl. The trouble over the tam-o'-shanter had become the most talked-of incident of the school term. For the several following days Rebecca was scarcely seen outside her room, save in going to and from her classes.

She did not again appear in the dining hall. How she arranged about meals Ruth and her friends could not imagine. Then the housekeeper admitted to Ruth that she had allowed the lonely girl to get her own little meals in her room, as she had cooking utensils and an alcohol lamp.

"It is not usually allowed, I know. But Miss Frayne seems to have come to college prepared to live in just that way. She is a small eater, anyway. And—well, anything to avoid friction."

"Of course," Ruth said to Helen and Jennie Stone, "lots of girls live in furnished rooms and get their own meals—working girls and students. But it is not a system generally allowed at college, and at Ardmore especially. We shall hear from the faculty about it before the matter is done with."

"Well, we're not doing it," scoffed Jennie. "And that Rebecca Frayne is behaving like a chump."

"But how she does stick to that awful tam!" groaned Helen.

"Stubborn as a mule," agreed Jennie.

"I saw her with another hat on to-day," said Ruth, reflectively.

"That's so! It was the one she wore the day she arrived," Helen said quickly. "A summer hat. I wonder what she did bring in that trunk, anyway? She has displayed no such charming array of finery as I expected."

Ruth did not discuss this point. She was more interested in the state of Rebecca's mind, though, of course, there was not much time for her to give to anything but her studies and regular duties now, for as the term advanced the freshmen found their hours pretty well filled.

Scrub teams for certain indoor sports had been made up, and even Jennie Stone took up the playing of basketball with vigor. She was really losing flesh. She kept a card tacked upon her door on which she set down the fluctuations of her bodily changes daily. When she lost a whole pound in weight she wrote it down in red ink.

Their activities kept the three friends well occupied, both physically and mentally. Yet Ruth Fielding could not feel wholly satisfied or content when she knew that one of her mates was in trouble. She had taken an interest in Rebecca Frayne at the beginning of the semester; yet of all the freshmen Rebecca was the one whom she knew the least.

"And that poor girl needs somebody for a friend—I feel it!" Ruth told herself. "Of course, she is to blame for the situation in which she now is. But for that very reason she ought to have somebody with whom to talk it over."

Ruth determined to be that confidant of the girl who seemed to wish no associate and no confidant. She began to loiter in the corridors between recitation hours and at odd times. Whenever she knocked on Rebecca's door there was no reply. Other girls who had tried it quickly gave up their sympathetic attentions. If the foolish girl wished for no friends, let her go her own way. That became the attitude of the freshman class. Of course, the sophomores followed the lead of the seniors and the juniors, having as little to do with the unfortunate girl as possible.

But the day and hour came at last when Ruth chanced to be right at hand when Rebecca Frayne came in and unlocked her room door. Her arms were full of small packages. Ruth knew that she had walked all the way to the grocery store on the edge of Greenburg, which the college girls often patronized.

It had been a long, cold walk, and Rebecca's fingers were numb. She dropped a paper bag—and it contained eggs!

Now, it is quite impossible to hide the fact of a dropped egg. At another time Ruth might have laughed; but now she soberly retrieved the paper bag before the broken eggs could do much damage, and stepped into the room after the nervous Rebecca.

"Oh, thank you!" gasped the girl. "Put—put them down anywhere. Thank you!"

"My goodness!" said Ruth, laughing, "you can't put broken eggs down anywhere. Don't you see they are runny?"

"Never mind, Miss Fielding——"

"Oh! you've a regular kitchenette here, haven't you?" said Ruth, emboldened to look behind a curtain. "How cunning. I'll put these eggs in this clean dish. Mercy, but they are scrambled!"

"Don't trouble, Miss Fielding. You are very kind."

"But scrambled eggs are pretty good, at that," Ruth went on, unheeding the other girl's nervousness. "If you can only get the broken shells out of them," and she began coolly to do this with a fork. "I should think you would not like eating alone, Rebecca."

The other girl stared at her. "How can I help it?" she asked harshly.

"Just by getting a proper tam and stop being stubborn," Ruth told her.

"Miss Fielding!" cried Rebecca, her face flushing. "Do you think I do this for—for fun?"

"You must. It isn't a disease, is it?" and Ruth laughed aloud, determined to refuse to take the other's tragic words seriously.

"You—you are unbearable!" gasped Rebecca.

"No, I'm not. I want to be your friend," Ruth declared boldly. "I want you to have other friends, too. No use flocking by one's self at college. Why, my dear girl! you are missing all that is best in college life."

"I'd like to know what is best in college life!" burst out Rebecca Frayne, sullenly.

"Friendship. Companionship. The rubbing of one mind against another," Ruth said promptly.

"Pooh!" returned the startled Rebecca. "I wouldn't want to rub my mind against some of these girls' minds. All I ever hear them talk about is dress or amusements."

"I don't think you know many of the other girls well enough to judge the calibre of their minds," said Ruth, gently.

"And why don't I?" demanded Rebecca, still with a sort of suppressed fury.

"We all judge more or less by appearances," Ruth admitted slowly. "I presume you, too, were judged that way."

"What do you mean, Miss Fielding?" asked Rebecca, more mildly.

"When you came here to Ardmore you made a first impression. We all do," Ruth said.

"Yes," Rebecca admitted, with a slight curl of her lip. She was naturally a proud-looking girl, and she seemed actually haughty now. "I was mistaken for you, I believe."

Ruth laughed heartily at that.

"I should be a good friend of yours," she said. "It was a great sell on those sophomores. They had determined to make poor little me suffer for some small notoriety I had gained at boarding school."

"I never went to boarding school," snapped Rebecca. "I never was anywhere till I came to college. Just to our local schools. I worked hard, let me tell you, to pass the examinations to get in here."

"And why don't you let your mind broaden and get the best there is to be had at Ardmore?" Ruth demanded, quickly. "The girls misunderstand you. I can see that. We freshmen have got to bow our heads to the will of the upper classes. It doesn't hurt—much," and she laughed again.

"Do you think I am wearing this old tam because I am stubborn?" demanded the other girl, again with that fierceness that seemed so strange in one so young.

"Why—aren't you?"

"No."

"Why do you wear it, then?" asked Ruth, wonderingly.

"Because I cannot afford to buy another!"

Rebecca Frayne said this in so tense a voice that Ruth was fairly staggered. The girl of the Red Mill gazed upon the other's flaming face for a full minute without making any reply. Then, faintly, she said:

"I—I didn't understand, Rebecca. We none of us do, I guess. You came here in such style! That heavy trunk and those bags——"

"All out of our attic," said the other, sharply. "Did you think them filled with frocks and furbelows? See here!"

Ruth had already noticed the packages of papers piled along one wall of the room. Rebecca pointed to them.

"Out of our attic, too," she said, with a scornful laugh that was really no laugh at all. "Old papers that have lain there since the Civil War."

"But, Rebecca——"

"Why did I do it?" put in the other, in the same hard voice. "Because I was a little fool. Because I did not understand.

"I didn't know just what college was like. I never talked with a girl from college in my life. I thought this was a place where only rich girls were welcome."

"Oh, Rebecca!" cried Ruth. "That isn't so."

"I see it now," agreed the other girl, shortly. "But we always have had to make a bluff at our house. Since I can remember, at least. Grandfather was wealthy; but our generation is as poor as Job's turkey.

"I didn't want to appear poor when I arrived here; so I got out the old bags and the big trunk, filled them with papers, and brought them along. A friend lent me that car I arrived in. I—I thought I'd make a splurge right at first, and then my social standing would not be questioned."

"Oh, Rebecca! How foolish," murmured Ruth.

"Don't say that!" stormed the girl. "I see that I started all wrong. But I can't help it now," and suddenly she burst into a passion of weeping.



CHAPTER XVII

WHAT WAS IN REBECCA'S HEART

It was some time before Ruth could quiet the almost hysterical girl. Rebecca Frayne had held herself in check so long, and the bitterness of her position had so festered in her mind, that now the barriers were burst she could not control herself.

But Ruth Fielding was sympathetic. And her heart went out to this lonely and foolish girl as it seldom had to any person in distress. She felt, too, did Ruth, as though it was partly her fault and the fault of the other freshmen that Rebecca was in this state of mind.

She was fearful that having actually forced herself upon Rebecca that the girl might, when she came to herself, turn against her. But at present Rebecca's heart was so full that it spilled over, once having found a confidant.

In Ruth Fielding's arms the unfortunate girl told a story that, if supremely silly from one standpoint, was a perfectly natural and not uncommon story.

She was a girl, born and brought up in a quiet, small town, living in the biggest and finest house in that town, yet having suffered actual privations all her life for the sake of keeping up appearances.

The Frayne family was supposed to be wealthy. Not as wealthy as a generation or so before; still, the Fraynes were looked upon as the leaders in local society.

There was now only an aunt, Rebecca, a younger sister, and a brother who was in New York struggling upward in a commission house.

"And if it were not for the little Fred can spare me and sends me twice a month, I couldn't stay here," Rebecca confessed during this long talk with Ruth. "He's the best boy who ever lived."

"He must be," Ruth agreed. "I'd be glad to have a brother like that."

Rebecca had been hungry for books. She had always hoped to take a college course.

"But I was ignorant of everything," she sighed.

Ruth gathered, too, that the aunt, who was at the nominal head of the Frayne household, was also ignorant. This Aunt Emmy seemed to be an empty-headed creature who thought that the most essential thing for a girl in life was to be fancifully dressed, and to attain a position in society.

Aunt Emmy had evidently filled Rebecca's head with such notions. The girl had come to Ardmore with a totally wrong idea of what it meant to be in college.

"Why! some of these girls act as waitresses," said Rebecca. "I couldn't do that even to obtain the education I want so much. Oh! Aunt Emmy would never hear to it."

"It's a perfectly legitimate way of helping earn one's tuition," Ruth said.

"The Fraynes have never done such things," the other girl said haughtily.

And right there and then Ruth decided that Rebecca Frayne was going to have a very hard time, indeed, at Ardmore unless she learned to look upon life quite differently from the way she had been taught at home.

Already Ruth Fielding had seen enough at Ardmore to know that many of the very girls whose duties Rebecca scorned, were getting more out of their college life than Rebecca Frayne could possibly get unless she took a radically different view of life and its comparative values from that her present standards gave her.

The girls who were waitresses, and did other work to help pay for their tuition or for their board were busy and happy and were respected by their mates. In addition, they were often the best scholars in the classes.

Rebecca was wrong in scorning those who combined domestic service with an attempt to obtain an education. But Ruth was wise enough to see that this feeling was inbred in Rebecca. It was useless to try to change her opinion upon it.

If Rebecca were poverty-stricken, her purse could not be replenished by any such means as these other girls found to help them over the hard places. In this matter of the tam-o'-shanter, for instance, it would be very difficult to help the girl. Ruth knew better than to offer to pay for the new tam-o'-shanter the freshman could not afford to buy. To make such an offer would immediately close the door of the strange girl's friendship to Ruth. So she did not hint at such a thing. She talked on, beginning to laugh and joke with Rebecca, and finally brought her out of her tears.

"Cheer up," Ruth said. "You are making the worst possible use of your time here—keeping to yourself and being so afraid of making friends. We're not all rich girls, I assure you. And the girls on this corridor are particularly nice."

"I suppose that may be. But if everywhere I go they show so plainly they don't want me——"

"That will stop!" cried Ruth, vigorously. "If I have to go to Dr. Milroth myself, it shall be stopped. It is hazing of the crudest kind. Oh! what a prettily crocheted table-mat. It's old-fashioned, but pretty."

"Aunty does that, almost all the time," Rebecca said, with a little laugh. "Fred once said—in confidence, of course—that half the family income goes for Aunt Emmy's wool."

"Do you do it, too?" Ruth asked suspiciously.

"Oh yes. I can."

"Say! could you crochet one of these tams?" cried Ruth, eagerly.

"Why—I suppose so," admitted the other girl.

"Then, why not? Do it to please the seniors and juniors. It won't hurt to bow to a custom, will it? And you only need buy a few hanks of wool at a time."

Rebecca's face flamed again; but she took the suggestion, after all, with some meekness.

"I might do that," she admitted.

"All right. Then you'll be doing your part. And talk to the girls. Let them talk to you. Come down to the dining-room for your meals again. You know, the housekeeper, Mrs. Ebbets, will soon be getting into trouble about you. Somebody will talk to Dr. Milroth or to some other member of the upper faculty."

"I suppose so," groaned Rebecca. "They won't let poor little me alone."

"Oh, you can't expect to have your own way at school," cried Ruth, laughing. "Oh, and say!"

"Well, Miss Fielding?"

"Do call me Ruth," begged the girl of the Red Mill. "It won't cost you a cent more," but she said it so good-naturedly that Rebecca had to laugh.

"I will," said the other girl, vehemently. "You are the very nicest little thing!"

"Well, now that's settled," laughed Ruth, "do something for me, will you?"

"Any—anything I can," agreed Rebecca, with some doubt.

"You know we girls on this corridor are going to have a sitting-room all to ourselves. That corner room that is empty. Everybody is going to buy—is going to give something to help furnish the room."

"Oh, Ruth! I can't——"

"Yes you can," interrupted Ruth, quickly. "When you stop this foolish eating by yourself, you can bring over your alcohol lamp. It's just what we want to make tea on. Now, say you will, Rebecca!"

"I—I will. Why, yes, I can do that," Rebecca agreed.

"Goody! I'll tell the girls. And you'll be as welcome as the flowers in May, lamp or no lamp," she cried, kissing Rebecca again and bustling out of the room.



CHAPTER XVIII

BEARDING THE LIONS

Ruth had shown a very cheerful face before Rebecca Frayne, but when she was once out of the room the girl of the Red Mill did not show such a superabundance of cheerfulness.

She knew well enough that Rebecca had become so unpopular that public opinion could not be changed regarding her in a moment.

Besides, there were the two upper classes to be considered. Their order regarding the freshmen's head-covering had been flagrantly disobeyed, and would have to be disobeyed for some time to come. A girl cannot crochet a tam-o'-shanter in a minute.

Having undertaken to straighten out Rebecca Frayne's troubles, however, Ruth did not publicly shrink from the task. She was one who made up her mind quickly, and having made it up, set to work immediately to carry the matter through.

Merry Dexter, the first senior she had met upon coming to Ardmore, was kindly disposed toward her, and Ruth knew that Miss Dexter was an influential member of her class. Therefore, Ruth took her trouble—and Rebecca's—directly to Miss Dexter.

Yet, she did not feel that she had a right to explain, even to this one senior, all that Rebecca Frayne had confided to her. She realized that the girl, with her false standards of respectability and social standing, would never be able to hold up her head at college if her real financial situation were known to the girls in general. Ruth was bound, however, to take Miss Dexter somewhat into her confidence to obtain a hearing. She put the matter before the senior as nicely as possible, saying in conclusion:

"And she will knit herself a tam of the proper color just as soon as possible. No girl, you know, Miss Dexter, likes to admit that she is poor. It is dreadfully embarrassing. So I hope that this matter will be adjusted without her situation being discussed."

"Goodness! I can't change things," the senior declared. "Not unless that girl agrees to do as she is told—like the rest of you freshies."

"Then my opinion of your class, Miss Dexter," Ruth said firmly, "must be entirely wrong. I did not believe that they ordered us to wear baby blue tams just out of an arbitrary desire to make us obey. Had I believed that I would not have bought a new tam myself!"

"You wouldn't?"

"No, Miss Dexter. Nor would a great many of us freshmen. We believed the order had a deeper significance—and it had. It helped our class get together. We are combined now, we are a social body. And I believe that if I took this matter up with Rebecca's class, and explained just her situation to them (which, of course, I do not want to do), the freshmen as a whole would back me in a revolt against the upper classes."

"You're pretty sure of that, Ruth Fielding, are you?" demanded the senior.

"Yes, I am. We'd all refuse to wear the new tams. You seniors and juniors would have a nice time sending us all to Coventry, wouldn't you? If you didn't want to eat with us, you'd all go hungry for a long time before the freshmen would do as Rebecca foolishly did."

Miss Dexter laughed at that. And then she hugged Ruth.

"I believe you are a dear girl, with a lot of good sense in your head," she said. "But you must come before our executive committee and talk to them."

"Oh, dear! Beard the lions in their den?" cried Ruth.

"Yes, my dear. I cannot be your spokesman."

Ruth found this a harder task than she had bargained for; but she went that same evening to a hastily called meeting of the senior committee. Perhaps Miss Dexter had done more for her than she agreed, however, for Ruth found these older girls very kind and she seemingly made them easily understand Rebecca's situation without being obliged to say in just so many words that the girl was actually poverty-stricken.

And it was probable, too, that Ruth Fielding helped herself in this incident as much as she did her classmate. The members of the older classes thereafter gave the girl of the Red Mill considerably more attention than she had previously received. Ruth began to feel surprised that she had so many warm friends and pleasant acquaintances in the college, even among the sophomores of Edith Phelps' stamp. Edith Phelps found her tart jokes about the "canned-drama authoress" falling rather flat, so she dropped the matter.

Older girls stopped on the walks to talk to Ruth. They sat beside her in chapel and at other assemblies, and seemed to like to talk with her. Although Ruth did not hold an office in her own class organization, yet she bade fair to become soon the most popular freshman at Ardmore.

Ruth was perfectly unconscious of this fact, for she had not a spark of vanity in her make-up. Her mind was so filled with other and more important things that her social conquests impressed her but little. She did, however, think a good bit about poor Rebecca Frayne's situation. She warned her personal friends among the freshmen, especially those at Dare Hall, to say nothing to Rebecca about the unfortunate affair.

Rebecca came into the dining-room again. Ruth knew that she had actually begun to crochet a baby blue tam-o'-shanter. But it was a question in Ruth's mind if the odd girl would be able to "keep up appearances" on the little money she had left and that which her brother could send her from time to time. It was quite tragic, after all. Rebecca was sure of good and sufficient food as long as she could pay her board; but the girl undoubtedly needed other things which she could not purchase.

Naturally, youth cannot give its entire attention to even so tragic a matter as this. Ruth's gay friends acted as counterweights in her mind to Rebecca's troubles.

The girls were out on the lake very frequently as the cold weather continued; but Ruth never saw again the strange girl whom she and Helen had interviewed at night on Bliss Island.

Hearing from Aunt Alvirah as she did with more or less frequency, the girl of the Red Mill was assured that Maggie seemed content and was proving a great help to the crippled old housekeeper. Maggie seemed quite settled in her situation.

"Just because that queer girl looked like Maggie doesn't prove that Maggie knows her," Ruth told herself. "Still—it's odd."

Stormy weather kept the college girls indoors a good deal; and the general sitting-room on Ruth's corridor became the most social spot in the whole college.

The girls whose dormitory rooms were there, irrespective of class, all shared in the furnishing of the sitting-room. Second-hand furniture is always to be had of dealers near an institution like Ardmore. Besides, the girls all owned little things they could spare for the general comfort, like Rebecca Frayne's alcohol lamp.

Helen had a tea set; somebody else furnished trays. In fact, all the "comforts of home" were supplied to that sitting-room; and the girls were considered very fortunate by their mates in other parts of the hall, and, indeed, in the other three dormitory buildings.

But during the holiday recess something happened that bade fair to deprive Ruth and her friends of their special perquisite. Dr. McCurdy's wife's sister came to Ardmore. The McCurdys did not keep house, preferring to board. They could find no room for Mrs. Jaynes, until it was remembered that there was an unassigned dormitory room at Dare Hall.

Many of the girls had gone home over the brief holidays; but our three friends from Briarwood had remained at Ardmore.

So Ruth and Helen and Jennie Stone chanced to be among the girls present when the housekeeper of Dare Hall came into the sitting-room and, to quote Jennie, informed them that they must "vamoose the ranch."

"That is what Ann Hicks would call it," Jennie said, defending her language when taken to task for it. "We've just got to get out—and it's a mean shame."

Dr. McCurdy was one of the important members of the faculty. Of course, the girls on that corridor had no real right to the extra room. All they could do was to voice their disappointment—and they did that, one may be sure, with vociferation.

"And just when we had come to be so comfortably fixed here," groaned one, when the housekeeper had departed. "I know I shall dis-like that Mrs. Jaynes extremely."

"We won't speak to her!" cried Helen, in a somewhat vixenish tone.

"Maybe she won't care if we don't," laughed Ruth.

But it was no laughing matter, as they all felt. They made a gloomy party in the pretty sitting-room that last evening of its occupancy as a community resort.

"There's Clara Mayberry in her rocker again on that squeaky board," Rebecca Frayne remarked. "I hope she rocks on that board every evening over this woman's head who has turned us out."

"Let's all hope so," murmured Helen.

Jennie Stone suddenly sat upright in the rocker she was occupying, but continued to glare at the ceiling. A board in the floor of the room above had frequently annoyed them before. Clara Mayberry sometimes forgot and placed her rocker on that particular spot.

"If—if she had to listen to that long," gasped Jennie suddenly, "she would go crazy. She's just that kind of nervous female. I saw her at chapel this morning."

"But even Clara couldn't stand the squeak of that board long," Ruth observed, smiling.

Without another word Jennie left the room. She came back later, so full of mystery, as Helen declared, that she seemed on the verge of bursting.

However, Jennie refused to explain herself in any particular; but the board in Clara Mayberry's room did not squeak again that evening.



CHAPTER XIX

A DEEP, DARK PLOT

"Heavy is actually losing flesh," Helen declared to Ruth. "I can see it."

"You mean you can't see it," laughed her chum. "That is, you can't see so much of it as there used to be. If she keeps on with the rowing machine work in the gym and the basket ball practise and dancing, she will soon be the thinnest girl who ever came to Ardmore."

"Oh, never!" cried Helen. "I don't believe I should like Heavy so much if she wasn't a little fat."

People who had not seen Jennie Stone for some time observed the change in her appearance more particularly than did her two close friends. This was proved when Mr. Cameron and Tom arrived.

For, as the girls did not go home for just a few days, Helen's father and her twin unexpectedly appeared at college on Christmas Eve, and their company delighted the chums immensely.

On Friday evenings the girls could have company, and on all Saturday afternoons, even during the college term. Also a girl could have a young man call on her Sunday evening, provided he took her to service at chapel.

The three Briarwood friends had had no such company heretofore. They made the most of Mr. Cameron and Tom, therefore, during Christmas week.

There was splendid sleighing, and the skating on the lake was at its very best. Ruth insisted upon including Rebecca Frayne in some of their parties, and Rebecca proved to be good fun.

Tom stared at Jennie Stone, round-eyed, when first he saw her.

"What's the matter with you, Tom Cameron?" the fleshy girl asked, rather tartly. "Didn't you ever see a good-looking girl before?"

"But say, Jennie!" he cried, "are you going into a decline?"

"I decline to answer," she responded. But she dimpled when she said it, and evidently considered Tom's rather blunt remark a compliment.

The Christmas holidays were over all too soon, it seemed to the girls. Yet they took up the class work again with vigor.

Their acquaintanceship was broadening daily, both in the student body and among the instructors. Most of the strangeness of this new college world had worn off. Ruth and Helen and Jennie were full-fledged "Ardmores" now, quite as devoted to the college as they had been to dear old Briarwood.

After New Year's there was a raw and rainy spell that spoiled many of the outdoor sports. Practice in the gymnasium increased, and Helen said that Jennie Stone was bound to work herself down to a veritable shadow if the bad weather continued long.

Ruth was in Rebecca's room one dingy, rainy afternoon, having skipped gymnasium work of all kind for the day. The proprietor of the room had finished her baby blue cap and had worn it the first time that week.

"I feel that they are not all staring at me now," she confessed to Ruth.

Ruth was at the piles of old papers which Rebecca had hidden under a half-worn portierre she had brought from home.

"Do you know," the girl of the Red Mill said reflectively, "these old things are awfully interesting, Becky?"

"What old things?"

"These papers. I've opened one bundle. They were all printed in Richmond during the Civil War. Why, paper must have been awfully scarce then. Some of these are actually printed on wrapping paper—you can scarcely read the print."

"Ought to look at those Charleston papers," said Rebecca, carelessly. "There are full files of those, too, I believe. Why, some of them are printed on wall paper."

"No!"

"Yes they are. Ridiculous, wasn't it?"

Ruth sat silent for a while. Finally she asked:

"Are you sure, Becky, that you have quite complete files here of this Richmond paper? For all the war time, I mean?"

"Yes. And of the South Carolina paper, too. Father collected them during and immediately following the war. He was down there for years, you see."

"I see," Ruth said quietly, and for a long time said nothing more.

But that evening she wrote several letters which she did not show Helen, and took them herself to the mailbag in the lower hall.

Before this, Mrs. Jaynes, Dr. McCurdy's sister-in-law, was settled in the room which had formerly been used by the girls as their own particular sitting-room. She was not an attractive woman at all; so it was not hard for her youthful associates on that corridor of Dare Hall to declare war upon Mrs. Jaynes.

Indeed, without having been introduced to a single girl there, Mrs. Jaynes eyed them all as though she suspected they belonged to a tribe of Bushmen.

Naturally, during hours of relaxation, and occasionally at other times, the girls joked and laughed and raced through the halls and sang and otherwise acted as a crowd of young people usually act.

Mrs. Jaynes was plainly of that sort that believes that all youthfulness and ebullition of spirits should be suppressed. Luckily, she met the girls but seldom—only when she was going to and from her room. On stormy days she remained shut up in her apartment most of the time, and Mrs. Ebbetts sent a maid up with her tray at meal time. She never ate in the Dare Hall dining-room.

Meantime, Jennie Stone had several mysterious sessions with certain of the girls who felt quite as she did regarding the usurpation of Dr. McCurdy's sister-in-law of the spare room. Had Ruth not been so busy in other directions she would have realized that a plot of some kind was in process of formation, for Helen was in it, as well.

Jennie Stone had made a friend of Clara Mayberry on the floor above. In fact, a number of the girls on the lower corridor affected by the presence of Mrs. Jaynes, were in and out of Clara's room all day long. None of these girls remained long at a time—not more than half an hour; but another visitor always appeared before the first left, right through the day, from breakfast call till "lights out." And after retiring hour there began to be seen figures stealing through the corridors and on the stairway between the two floors. That is, there would have been seen such ghostly marauders had there been anybody to watch.

Mrs. Jaynes crossly complained to Mrs. Ebbetts that she was kept awake all night long—and all day, for that matter! But as she never put her head out of her room after the lights were lowered in the corridors, she did not discover the soft-footed spectres of the night.

"But," she complained to Mrs. Ebbetts, "it is the noisiest room I ever was in. Such a squeaking you never heard! And all the time, day and night."

"I do not understand that at all," said the puzzled housekeeper.

"I'd like to know how the girl who had that room before I took it, stood that awful squeaking noise," said the visitor.

"Why, Mrs. Jaynes," said the housekeeper, "no girl slept there. It was a sitting-room."

"Even so, I cannot understand how anybody could endure the noise. If I believed in such things I should declare the room was haunted."

"Indeed, Madam!" gasped the housekeeper. "I do not understand it."

"Well, I cannot endure it. I shall tell my sister that I cannot remain here at Ardmore unless she finds me other lodgings. That awful squeak, squeak, squeak continues day and night. It is unbearable."

In the end, Dr. McCurdy found lodgings for his sister-in-law in Greenburg. The girls of Ruth's corridor were delighted, and that night held a regular orgy in the recovered sitting-room.

"Thank goodness!" sighed Jennie Stone, "no more up and down all night for us, either. We may sleep in peace, as well as occupy the room in peace."

"What do you mean, Heavy?" demanded Ruth.

"Oh, Ruthie! That's one time we put one over on you, dear," said the fleshy girl sweetly. "You were not asked to join in the conspiracy. We feared your known sympathetic nature would revolt."

"But explain!"

"Why, Clara let us use her rocking chair," Jennie said demurely. "It's a very nice chair. We all rocked in it, one after another, half-hour watches being assigned——"

"Not at night?" cried the horror-stricken Ruth.

"Oh, yes. All day and all night. Every little minute that rocker was going upon the squeaky board. It's a wonder the board is not worn out," chuckled the wicked Jennie.

"Well, I never!" proclaimed Ruth, aghast. "What won't you think of next, Jennie Stone?"

"I don't know. I know I'm awfully smart," sighed Jennie. "I did so much of the rocking myself, however, that I don't much care if I never see a rocking-chair again."



CHAPTER XX

TWO SURPRISES

Ruth Fielding knew that Rebecca Frayne was painfully embarrassed for money. She managed to find the wherewithal for her board, and her textbooks of course had been paid for at the beginning of the college year. But there are always incidentals and unforeseen small expenses, which crop up in a most unexpected manner and clamor for payment.

Rebecca never opened her lips about these troubles, despite the fact that she loved Ruth and was much with the girl of the Red Mill. But Ruth was keen-eyed. She knew that Rebecca suffered for articles of clothing. She saw that her raiment was becoming very, very shabby.

The girl in this trouble was foolish, of course. But foolishness is a disease not so easily cured. There was not the slightest chance of giving Rebecca anything that she needed; Ruth knew that quite well. Her finery—and cheap enough it was—the girl would flaunt to the bitter end.

Deep down she was a good girl in every respect; but she did put on airs and ape the wealthy girls she saw. What garments she owned had been ultra-fashionable in cut, if poor in texture, when she had come to college. But fashions change so frequently nowadays that already poor Rebecca Frayne was behind the styles—and she knew it and grieved bitterly.

Most of her mates at Dare Hall, the freshmen especially, usually dressed in short cloth skirts and middy blouses, with a warm coat over all in cold weather. Would Rebecca be caught going to classes in such an outfit? Not much! That was why her better clothes wore out so quickly and now looked so shabby. Jennie Stone said, with disgust, and with more than a little truth, perhaps:

"That girl primps to go to recitations just as though she were bound for a party. I don't see how she finds time for study."

Ruth realized that Rebecca was made that way, and that was all there was to it. She wasted no strength, nor did she run the risk of being bad friends with the unwise girl, by criticising these silly things. Ruth believed in being helpful, or else keeping still.

Rebecca could never be induced to try to do the things that other poor girls did at college to help pay their expenses. Perhaps she was not really fitted for such services, and would only have failed.

Other girls acted as waitresses, did sewing, one looked after the linen for one of the dormitories, another darned hose and repaired lingerie. Dr. Frances Milroth's own personal secretary was a junior who was working her way through Ardmore and was taking a high mark, too, in her studies.

One girl helped Mrs. Leidenburg with her children during several hours of each day. Some girls were agents for articles which their college mates were glad to secure easily and quickly.

Indeed, the field of endeavor seemed rather well covered, and it would have been hard to discover anything new for Rebecca Frayne to do, had the girl even been willing to "go into trade," a thing Rebecca had told Ruth a Frayne had never done.

This attitude of the Frayne family seemed quite ridiculous to Ruth, but she knew it was absolutely useless to scold Rebecca.

Indeed, it was not Ruth Fielding's way to be a scold. If she could not be helpful she preferred to ignore that which she saw was wrong. And in Rebecca Frayne's case she was determined to be helpful if she could. Rebecca was a bright scholar. After all, she would shine in her class before all was said and done. They could not afford to lose such a really bright girl from among the freshmen.

Often on stormy days Ruth spent the time between recitations and dinner in Rebecca's room.

"I never saw anybody so fond of old papers as you are, Ruthie," Rebecca said. "Do take 'em all if you like. Of course, I'll never be silly enough to carry them back home with me. They are only useful to help build the fire."

"Don't dare destroy one of them, Rebecca Frayne!" Ruth had warned her—and actually made her promise that she would not do so.

Then the replies to Ruth's letters came. She had gone all through the bundles of papers by this time, arranged them according to their dates of issue, and wrapped the different years' issues in strong paper. Rebecca could not see for the life of her, she said, what Ruth was about.

"Surely they can't be worth much as old paper, Ruthie. I know you are a regular little business woman; but junk men aren't allowed on the college grounds."

"Expressmen are, my dear," laughed Ruth.

"What do you mean? What are you going to do with those papers?"

"You said you didn't care——"

"And I don't. They are yours to do with as you please," said the generous Rebecca Frayne.

"To punish you," Ruth said seriously, "I ought really to take you at your word," and she shook her head.

"What meanest thou, my fair young lady?" asked Rebecca, laughing.

"Read this," commanded Ruth, handing her, with the air of the stage hero "producing the papers," one of the letters she had received. "Cast your glance over this, Miss Frayne."

The other received the letter curiously, and read it with dawning surprise. She read it twice and then gazed at Ruth with almost speechless amazement.

"Well! what do you think of your Aunt Ruth now?" demanded the girl of the Red Mill, laughing.

"It—it can't be so, Ruthie!" murmured Rebecca Frayne, the hand which held the letter fairly shaking.