Betty Wales, Freshman

quoted Mary blithely. “You can never put that on my tombstone.”

“Better tell your friend Dr. Hinsdale about your vivid ornithological imagination,” suggested Katherine. “It might interest him.”

“Oh, I shall,” said Mary easily. “But to-night, young ladies, you will be pleased to learn that I am invited up to Professor Lawrence’s to dinner, so that I can see his bird skins. Incidentally I shall meet his fascinating brother. In about ten minutes I shall want to be hooked up, Roberta.”

“She’s one too many for us, isn’t she?” said Katherine, as Mary went gaily off, followed by the devoted Roberta, declaring in loud tones that the Mary-bird club was dissolved.

“I wish things that go wrong didn’t bother me any more than they do her,” said Betty wistfully.

“Cheer up,” urged Katherine, giving her a bearish hug. “You’ll win in the golf again to-morrow, and everything will come out all right in the end.”

“Everything? What do you mean?” inquired Betty sharply.

“Why, singles and doubles–twosomes and foursomes you call them, don’t you? They’ll all come out right.”

A moment later Katherine burst in upon her long-suffering roommate with a vehemence that made every cup on the tea-table rattle. “I almost let her know what we thought,” she said, “but I guess I smoothed it over. Do you suppose Eleanor Watson isn’t going to make up with her at all?”

CHAPTER XVIII
INTO PARADISE–AND OUT

There was a sudden commotion on the piazza and then Betty’s clear voice rose above the tumult. “We won it, one up! Isn’t that fine? Oh no, not the singles; we go on with them to-morrow, but I can’t possibly win. Oh, I’m so hot!”

Eleanor Watson smiled grimly as these speeches floated up to her from below. She had been lounging all the breathless afternoon, trying vainly to get rid of a headache; and the next day’s lessons were still to be learned.

“Ouch, how I hate June-bugs,” she muttered, stopping for the fifth time in as many minutes to drive out a buzzing intruder. She had just gotten one out when another flew straight at her unperceived and tangled himself in her hair. That was the limit of endurance. With one swift movement Eleanor turned off the gas, with another she pulled down her hair and released the prisoned beetle. Then she twisted up the soft coil again in the dark and went out into the sweet spring dusk.

At the next corner she gave an angry little exclamation and turned back toward the house. The girls had deserted the piazza before she came down, and now the only light seemed to be in Betty’s room. Every window there was shut, so it was no use to call. Eleanor climbed the stairs and knocked. Katherine and Betty were just starting for a trolley ride, to cool off the champion, Katherine explained; but Helen was going to be in all the evening.

“I pity you from the bottom of my heart,” said Eleanor, “but if you are really going to be here would you tell Lil Day when she comes that I have an awful headache and have gone off–that I’ll see her to-morrow. I could go down there, but if she’s in, her room will be fuller of June-bugs than mine. Hear them slam against that glass!” She turned to Betty stiffly. “I congratulate you on your victory,” she said.

“Oh thank you!” answered Betty eagerly. “Christy did most of it. Would–won’t you come out with us?”

“No, thank you. I feel like being all alone. I’m going down for a twilight row on Paradise.”

“You’ll get malaria,” said Katherine.

“You’ll catch cold, too, in that thin dress,” added Helen.

“I don’t mind, if only I don’t see any June-bugs,” answered Eleanor, “or any girls,” she added under her breath, when she had gained the lower hall.

The quickest way to Paradise was through the campus, but Eleanor chose an unfrequented back street, too ugly to attract the parties of girls who swarmed over the college grounds, looking like huge white moths as they flitted about under the trees. She walked rapidly, trying to escape thought in activity; but the thoughts ill-naturedly kept pace with her. As everybody who came in contact with Eleanor Watson was sure to remark, she was a girl brimful of strong possibilities both for good and evil; and to-night these were all awake and warring. Her year of bondage at college was nearly over. Only the day before she had received a letter from Judge Watson, coldly courteous, like all his epistles to his rebellious daughter, inquiring if it was her wish to return to Harding another year, and in the same mail had come an invitation from her aunt, asking her to spend the following winter in New York. Eleanor shrewdly guessed that in spite of her father’s disapproval of his sister’s careless frivolity, he would allow her to accept this invitation, for the obvious relief it would bring to himself and the second Mrs. Watson. He was fond of her, that she did not for a moment question, and he honestly wished her best good; but he did not want her in his house in her present mood.

“For which I don’t in the least blame him,” thought Eleanor.

She had started to answer his letter immediately, as he had wished, and then had hesitated and delayed, so that the decision involved in her reply was still before her. And yet why should she hesitate? She did not like Harding college; she had kept the letter of her agreement to stay there for one year; surely she was free now to do as she pleased–indeed, her father had said as much. But what did she please–that was a point that, unaccountably, she could not settle. Lately something had changed her attitude toward the life at Harding. Perhaps it was the afternoon with Miss Ferris, with the perception it had brought of aims and ideals as foreign to the ambitious schemes with which she had begun the year as to the angry indifference in which she was finishing it. Perhaps, as poor Helen had suggested, it was the melting loveliness of spring term. At any rate, as she heard the girls making their plans for the next year, squabbling amiably over the merits of the various campus houses, choosing roommates, bargaining for furniture, even securing partners for the commencement festivities still three years off, an unexplainable longing to stay on and finish the four years’ drama with the rest had seized upon Eleanor. But each time it came she had stifled it, reminding herself sternly that for her the four years held no pleasant possibilities; she had thrown away her chance–had neglected her work, alienated her friends, disappointed every one, and most of all herself. There was nothing left for her now but to go away beaten–not outwardly, for she still flattered herself that she had proved both to students and faculty her ability to make a very brilliant record at Harding had she been so inclined, and even her superiority to the drudgery of the routine work and the childish recreations. But in her heart of hearts Eleanor knew that this very disinclination to make the most of her opportunities, this fancied superiority to requirements that jarred on her undisciplined, haphazard training, was failure far more absolute and inexcusable than if dulness or any other sort of real inability to meet the requirements of the college life had been at the bottom of it. Her father would know it too, if the matter ever came to his notice; and her brother Jim, who was making such a splendid record at Cornell–he would know that, as Betty Wales had said once, quoting her sister’s friend, “Every nice girl likes college, though each has a different reason.” Well, Jim had thought for two years that she was a failure. Eleanor gulped hard to keep back the tears; she had meant to be everything to Jim, and she was only an annoyance.

It was almost dark by the time she reached the landing. A noisy crowd of girls, who had evidently been out with their supper, were just coming in. They exclaimed in astonishment when her canoe shot out from the boat-house.

“It’s awfully hard to see your way,” called one officious damsel.

“I can see in the dark like an owl,” sang back Eleanor, her good-humor restored the instant her paddle touched water,–for boating was her one passion.

Ah, but it was lovely on the river! She glided around the point of an island and was alone at last, with the stars, the soft, grape-scented breezes, and the dark water. She pulled up the stream with long, swift strokes, and then, where the trees hung low over the still water, she dropped the paddle, and slipping into the bottom of the canoe, leaned back against a cushioned seat and drank in the beauty of the darkness and solitude. She had never been out on Paradise River at night. “And I shall never come again except at night,” she resolved, breathing deep of the damp, soft air. Malaria–who cared for that? And when she was cold she could paddle a little and be warm again in a moment.

Suddenly she heard voices and saw two shapes moving slowly along the path on the bank.

“Oh, do hurry, Margaret,” said one. “I told her I’d be there by eight. Besides, it’s awfully dark and creepy here.”

“I tell you I can’t hurry, Lil,” returned the other. “I turned my ankle terribly back there, and I must sit down and rest, creeps or no creeps.”

“Oh, very well,” agreed the other voice grudgingly, and the shapes sank down on a knoll close to the water’s edge.

Eleanor had recognized them instantly; they were her sophomore friend, Lilian Day, and Margaret Payson, a junior whom Eleanor greatly admired. Her first impulse was to call out and offer to take the girls back in her canoe. Then she remembered that the little craft would hold only two with safety, that the girls would perhaps be startled if she spoke to them, and also that she had come down to Paradise largely to escape Lil’s importunate demands that she spend a month of her vacation at the Day camp in the Adirondacks. So, certain that they would never notice her in the darkness and the thick shadows, she lay still in the bottom of her boat and waited for them to go on.

“It’s a pity about her, isn’t it?” said Miss Payson, after she had rubbed her ankle for a while in silence.

“About whom?” inquired Lilian crossly.

“Why, Eleanor Watson; you just spoke of having an engagement with her. She seems to have been a general failure here.”

Eleanor started at the sound of her own name, then lay tense and rigid, waiting for Lilian’s answer. She knew it was not honorable to listen, and she certainly did not care to do so; but if she cried out now, after having kept silent so long, Lilian, who was absurdly nervous in the dark, might be seriously frightened. Perhaps she would disagree and change the subject. But no—

“Yes, a complete failure,” repeated Lilian distinctly. “Isn’t it queer? She’s really very clever, you know, and awfully amusing, besides being so amazingly beautiful. But there is a little footless streak of contrariness in her–we noticed it at boarding-school,–and it seems to have completely spoiled her.”

“It is queer, if she is all that you say. Perhaps next year she’ll be—”

“Oh, she isn’t coming back next year,” broke in Lilian. “She hates it here, you know, and she sees that she’s made a mess of it, too, though she wouldn’t admit it in a torture chamber. She thinks she has shown that college is beneath her talents, I suppose.”

“Little goose! Is she so talented?”

“Yes, indeed. She sings beautifully and plays the guitar rather well–she’d surely have made one of the musical clubs next year–and she can act, and write clever little stories. Oh, she’d have walked into everything going all right, if she hadn’t been such a goose–muddled her work and been generally offish and horrid.”

“Too bad,” said Miss Payson, rising with a groan. “Who do you think are the bright and shining stars among the freshmen, Lil?”

“Why Marion Lustig for literary ability, of course, and Emily Davis for stunts and Christy Mason for general all-around fineness, and socially–oh, let me think–the B’s, I should say, and–I forget her name–the little girl that Dottie King is so fond of. Here, take my arm, Margaret. You’ve got to get home some way, you know.”

Their voices trailed off into murmurs that grew fainter and fainter until the silence of the river and the wood was again unbroken. Eleanor sat up stiffly and stretched her arms above her head in sheer physical relief after the strain of utter stillness. Then, with a little sobbing cry, she leaned forward, bowing her head in her hands. Paradise–had they named it so because one ate there of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?

“A little footless streak!”

“An utter failure!”

What did it matter? She had known it all before. She had said those very words herself. But she had thought–she had been sure that other people did not understand it that way. Well, perhaps most people did not. No, that was nonsense. Lilian Day had achieved a position of prominence in her class purely through a remarkable alertness to public sentiment. Margaret Payson, a girl of a very different and much finer type, stood for the best of that sentiment. Eleanor had often admired her for her clear-sightedness and good judgment. They had said unhesitatingly that she was a failure; then the college thought so. Well, it was Jean Eastman’s fault then, and Caroline’s, and Betty Wales’s. Nonsense! it was her own. Should she go off in June and leave her name spelling failure behind her? Or should she come back and somehow change the failure to success? Could she?

She had no idea how long she sat there, turning the matter over in her mind, viewing it this way and that, considering what she could do if she came back, veering between a desire to go away and forget it all in the gay bustle of a New York winter, and the fierce revolt of the famous Watson pride, that found any amount of effort preferable to open and acknowledged defeat. But it must have been a long time, for when she pulled herself on to her seat and caught up the paddle, she was shivering with cold and her thin dress was dripping wet with the mist that lay thick over the river. Slowly she felt her way down-stream, pushing through the bank of fog, often running in shore in spite of her caution, and fearful every moment of striking a hidden rock or snag. Soft rustlings in the wood, strange plashings in the stream startled her. Lower down was the bewildering net-work of islands. Surely there were never so many before. Was the boat-house straight across from the last island, or a little down-stream? Which was straight across? And where was the last island? She had missed it somehow in the mist. She was below it, out in the wide mill-pond. Somewhere on the other side was the boat-house, and further down was a dam. Down-stream must be straight to the left. All at once the roar of the descending water sounded in Eleanor’s ears, and to her horror it did not come from the left. But when she tried to tell from which direction it did come, she could not decide; it seemed to reverberate from all sides at once; it was perilously near and it grew louder and more terrible every moment.

Suddenly a fierce, unreasoning fear took possession of Eleanor. She told herself sternly that there was no danger; the current in Paradise River was not so strong but that a good paddler could stem it with ease. In a moment the mist would lift and she could see the outline of one shore or the other. But the mist did not lift; instead it grew denser and more stifling, and although she turned her canoe this way and that and paddled with all her strength, the roar from the dam grew steadily to an ominous thunder. Then she remembered a gruesome legend that hung about the dam and the foaming pool in the shadow of the old mill far below, and dropped her paddle in an agony of fear. She might hurry herself over the dam in striving to escape it!

And still the deafening torrent pounded in her ears. If only she could get away from it–somewhere–anywhere just to be quiet. Would it be quiet in the pool by the mill? Eleanor slipped unsteadily into the bottom of her boat and tried to peer through the darkness at the black water, and to feel about with her hands for the current. As she did so, a bell rang up on the campus. It must be twenty minutes to ten. Eleanor gave a harsh, mirthless laugh. How stupid she had been! She would call, of course. If she could hear their bell, they could hear her voice and come for her. There would be an awkward moment of explanation, but what of that?

“Hallo! Hallo–o-o!” she called. Only the boom of the water answered.

“Hallo! Hallo–o-o!”

Again the boom of the water swallowed her cry and drowned it.

It was no use to call,–only a waste of strength.

Eleanor caught up her paddle and began to back water with all her might. That was what she should have done from the first, of course. She was cold all at once and very tired, but she would not give up yet.

She had quite forgotten that only a little while before it had not seemed to matter much what became of her. “But if I can’t keep at it all night—” she said to the mist and the river.

CHAPTER XIX
A LAST CHANCE

Helen’s choice of closed windows in preference to invading companies of moths and June-bugs had made the room so insufferably warm that between heat and excitement Betty could not get to sleep. Instead she tossed restlessly about on her narrow couch, listening to the banging of the trolleys at the next corner and wishing she were still sitting on the breezy front seat, as the car dashed down the long hill toward the station. At length she slipped softly out of bed and opened the door. Perhaps the breeze would come in better then. As she stood for a moment testing the result of her experiment, she noticed with surprise that Eleanor’s door was likewise open. This simple fact astonished her, because she remembered that on the hottest nights last fall Eleanor had persisted in shutting and locking her door. She had acquired the habit from living so much in hotels, she said; she could never go to sleep at all so long as her door was unfastened. “Perhaps it’s all right,” thought Betty, “but it looks queer. I believe I’ll just see if she’s in bed.” So she crept softly across the hall and looked into Eleanor’s room. It was empty, and the couch was in its daytime dress, covered with an oriental spread and piled high with pillows. “I suppose she stopped on the campus and got belated,” was Betty’s first idea. “But no, she couldn’t stay down there all night, and it’s long after ten. It must be half past eleven. I’ll–I’d better consult–Katherine.”

She chose Katherine instead of Rachel, because she had heard Eleanor speak about going to Paradise, and so could best help to decide whether it was reasonable to suppose that she was still there. Rachel was steadier and more dependable, but Katherine was resourceful and quick-witted. Besides, she was not a bit afraid of the dark.

She was sound asleep, but Betty managed to wake her and get her into the hall without disturbing any one else.

“Goodness!” exclaimed Katherine, when she heard the news. “You don’t think—”

“I think she’s lost in Paradise. It must have been pitch dark down there under the trees even before she got started, and you know she hasn’t any sense of direction. Don’t you remember her laughing about getting turned around every time she went to New York?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t seem possible to get lost on that little pond.”

“It’s bigger than it looks,” said Betty, “and there is the mist, too, to confuse her.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Does she know how to manage a boat?”

“Yes, capitally,” said Betty in so frightened a voice that Katherine dropped the subject.

“She’s lost up stream somewhere and afraid to move for fear of hitting a rock,” she said easily. “Or perhaps she’s right out in the pond by the boat-house and doesn’t dare to cross because she might go too far down toward the dam. We can find her all right, I guess.”

“Then you’ll come?” said Betty eagerly.

“Why, of course. You weren’t thinking of going alone, were you?”

“I thought maybe you’d think it was silly for any one to go. I suppose she might be at one of the campus houses.”

“She might, but I doubt it,” said Katherine. “She was painfully intent on solitude when she left here. Now don’t fuss too long about dressing.”

Without a word Betty sped off to her room. She was just pulling a rain-coat over a very meagre toilet when Katherine put her head in at the door. “Bring matches,” she said in a sepulchral whisper. Betty emptied the contents of her match-box into her ulster pocket, threw a cape over her arm for Eleanor, and followed Katherine cat-footed down the stairs. In the lower hall they stopped for a brief consultation.

“Ought we to tell Mrs. Chapin?” asked Betty doubtfully.

“Eleanor will hate us forever if we do,” said Katherine, “and I don’t see any special advantage in it. If we don’t find her, Mrs. Chapin can’t. We might tell Rachel though, in case we were missed.”

“Or we might leave a note where she would find it,” suggested Betty. “Then if we weren’t missed no one need know.”

“All right. You can go more quietly; I’ll wait here.” Katherine sank down on the lowest stair, while Betty flew back to scribble a note which she laid on Rachel’s pillow. Then the relief expedition started.

It was very strange being out so late. Before ten o’clock a girl may go anywhere in Harding, but after ten the streets are deserted and dreadful. Betty shivered and clung close to Katherine, who marched boldly along, declaring that it was much nicer outdoors than in, and that midnight was certainly the top of the evening for a walk.

“And if we find her way up the river we can all camp out for the night,” she suggested jovially.

“But if we don’t find her?”

Katherine, who had noticed Betty’s growing nervousness, refused to entertain the possibility.

“We shall,” she said.

“But if we don’t?” persisted Betty.

“Then I suppose we shall have to tell somebody who–who could–why, hunt for her more thoroughly,” stammered Katherine. “Or possibly we’d better wait till morning and make sure that she didn’t stay all night with Miss Day. But if we don’t find her, there will be plenty of time to discuss that.”

At the campus gateway the girls hesitated.

“Suppose we should meet the night-watchman?” said Betty anxiously. “Would he arrest us?”

Katherine laughed at her fears. “I was only wondering if we hadn’t better take the path through the orchard. If we go down by the dwelling-houses we might meet him, of course, and it would be awkward getting rid of him if he has an ordinary amount of curiosity.”

“But that path is spooky dark,” objected Betty.

“Not so dark as the street behind the campus,” said Katherine decidedly, “and that’s the only alternative. Come on.”

When they had almost reached the back limit of the campus Katherine halted suddenly. Betty clutched her in terror. “Do you see any one?” she whispered. Katherine put an arm around her frightened little comrade. “Not a person,” she said reassuringly, “not even the ghost of my grandmother. I was just wondering, Betty, if you’d care to go ahead down to the landing and call, while I waited up by the road. Eleanor is such a proud thing; she’ll hate dreadfully to be caught in this fix, and I know she’d rather have you come to find her than me or both of us. But perhaps you’d rather not go ahead. It is pretty dark down there.”

Betty lifted her face from Katherine’s shoulder and looked at the black darkness that was the road and the river bank, and below it to the pond that glistened here and there where the starlight fell on its cloak of mist.

“Of course,” said Katherine after a moment’s silence, “we can keep together just as well as not, as far as I am concerned. I only thought that perhaps, since this was your plan and you are so fond of Eleanor–oh well, I just thought you might like to have the fun of rescuing her,” finished Katherine desperately.

“Do you mean for me to go ahead and call, and if Eleanor answers not to say anything to her about your having come?”

“Yes.”

“Then how would you get home?”

“Oh, walk along behind you, just out of sight.”

“Wouldn’t you be afraid?”

“Hardly.”

“But I should be taking the credit for something I hadn’t done.”

“And Eleanor would be the happier thereby and none of the rest of the world would be affected either way.”

Betty looked at the pond again and then gave Katherine a soft little hug. “Katherine Kittredge, you’re an old dear,” she said, “and if you really don’t mind, I’ll go ahead; but if she asks me how I dared to come alone or says anything about how I got here, I shall tell her that you were with me.”

“All right, but I fancy she won’t be thinking about that. The matches are so she can see her way to you. It’s awfully hard to follow a sound across the water, but if you light one match after another she can get to you before the supply gives out, if she’s anywhere near. Don’t light any till she answers. If she doesn’t answer, I’ll come down to you and we’ll walk on up the river a little way and find her there.”

“Yes,” said Betty. “Where shall you stay?”

“Oh, right under this tree, I guess,” answered Katherine carelessly.

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

When Betty had fairly gone, doubts began to assail Katherine, as they have a habit of assailing impulsive people, after it is too late to pay heed to them. It occurred to her that she was cooperating in what might easily turn out to be a desperate adventure, and that it would have been the part of wisdom to enlist the services of more competent and better equipped searchers at once, without risking delay on the slender chance of finding Eleanor near the wharf. “Eleanor would have hated the publicity, but if she wants to come up here in the dark and frighten us all into hysteria she must take the consequences. And I’d have let her too, if it hadn’t been for Betty.”

An owl hooted, and Katherine jumped as nervously as Betty would have done. Poor Betty! She must be almost at the landing by this time. At that very moment a little quavering voice rang out over the water.

“Eleanor! Eleanor Watson! Eleanor! Oh, Eleanor, where are you?”

For a long moment there was silence. Then the owl hooted again. That was too much. Katherine jumped up with a bound and started down the bank toward Betty. She did not stop to find the path, and at the second step caught her foot and fell headlong. Apparently Betty did not hear her. She had not yet given up hope, for she was calling again, pausing each time to listen for the answer that did not come.

“Oh, Eleanor, Eleanor, aren’t you there?” she cried and stopped, even the courage of despair gone at last. Katherine, nursing a bruised knee on the hill above, had opened her mouth to call encouragement, when a low “Who is it?” floated across the water.

“Eleanor, is that you? It’s I–Betty Wales!” shrieked Betty.

Katherine nodded her head in silent token of “I told you so,” and slid back among the bushes to recuperate and await developments.

For the end was not yet. Eleanor was evidently far down toward the dam, close to the opposite bank. It was hard for her to hear Betty, and still harder for Betty to hear her. Her voice sounded faint and far off, and she seemed to be paralyzed with fear and quite incapable of further effort. When Betty begged her to paddle right across and began lighting matches in reckless profusion to show her the way, Eleanor simply repeated, “I can’t, I can’t,” in dull, dispirited monotone.

“Shall–I–come–for–you?” shouted Betty.

“You can’t,” returned Eleanor again.

“Non–sense!” shrieked Betty and then stood still on the wharf, apparently weighing Eleanor’s last opinion.

“Go ahead,” called Katherine in muffled tones from above.

Betty did not answer.

“Thinks I’m another owl, I suppose,” muttered Katherine, and limped down the bank to the wharf, frightening the nervous, overwrought Betty almost out of her wits at first, and then vastly relieving her by taking the entire direction of affairs into her own competent hands.

“You go right ahead. It’s the only way, and it’s perfectly easy in a heavy boat. That canoe might possibly go down with the current, but a big boat wouldn’t. Rachel and I tried it last week, when the river was higher. Now cross straight over and feel along the bank until you get to her. Then beach the canoe and come back the same way. Give me some matches. I’ll manage that part of it and then retire,–unless you’d rather be the one to wait here.”

“No, I’ll go,” answered Betty eagerly, vanishing into the boat-house after a pair of oars.

“She must be hanging on to something on shore,” went on Katherine, when Betty reappeared, “and she’s lost her nerve and doesn’t dare to let go. If you can’t get her into your boat, I’ll come; but somebody really ought to stay here. I had no idea the fog was so thick. Hurry now and cross straight over. You’re sure you’re not afraid?”

“Quite sure.” Betty was off, splashing her oars nervously through the still water, wrapped in the mist, whispering over and over Katherine’s last words, “Hurry and go straight. Hurry, hurry, go straight across.”

When she reached the other shore she called again to Eleanor, and the sobbing cry of relief that answered her made all the strain and effort seem as nothing. Cautiously creeping along the bank where the river was comparatively quiet, backing water now and then to test her strength with the current, she finally reached Eleanor, who had happened quite by chance to run near the bank and now sat in the frail canoe hanging by both hands to a branch that swept low over the water, exactly as Katherine had guessed.

“Why didn’t you beach the canoe, and stay on shore?” asked Betty, who had tied her own boat just above and was now up to her knees in the water, pulling Eleanor in.

“I tried to, but I lost my paddle, and so I was afraid to let go the tree again, and the water looked so deep. Oh, Betty, Betty!”

Eleanor sank down on the bank, sobbing as if her heart would break. Betty patted her arm in silence, and in a few moments she stood up, quieted. “You’re going to take me back?” she asked.

“Of course,” said Betty, cheerfully, leading the way to her boat.

“Please wait a minute,” commanded Eleanor.

Betty trembled. “She’s going to say she won’t go back with me,” she thought. “Please let me do it, Eleanor,” she begged.

“Yes,” said Eleanor, quickly, “but first I want to say something. I’ve been a hateful, horrid thing, Betty. I’ve believed unkind stories and done no end of mean things, and I deserve all that I’ve had to-night, except your coming after me. I’ve been ashamed of myself for months, only I wouldn’t say so. I know you can never want me for a friend again, after all my meanness; but Betty, say that you won’t let it hurt you–that you’ll try to forget all about it.”

Betty put a wet arm around Eleanor’s neck and kissed her cheek softly. “You weren’t to blame,” she said. “It was all a mistake and my horrid carelessness. Of course I want you for a friend. I want it more than anything else. And now don’t say another word about it, but just get into the boat and come home.”

They hardly spoke during the return passage; Eleanor was worn out with all she had gone through, and Betty was busy rowing and watching for Katherine’s matches, which made tiny, glimmering dots of light in the gloom. Eleanor did not seem to notice them, nor the shadowy figure that vanished around the boat-house just before they reached the wharf.

From her appointed station under the pine-tree Katherine heard the grinding of the boat on the gravel, the rattle of oars thrown down on the wharf, and then a low murmur of conversation that did not start up the hill toward her, as she had expected.

“Innocents!” sighed Katherine. “They’re actually stopping to talk it out down there in the wet. I’m glad they’ve made it up, and I’d do anything in reason for Betty Wales, but I certainly am sleepy,” and she yawned so loud that a blue jay that was roosting in the tree above her head fluttered up to a higher branch, screaming angrily.

“The note of the nestle,” laughed Katherine, and yawned again.

Down on the wharf Betty and Eleanor were curled up close together in an indiscriminate, happy tangle of rain-coat, golf-cape, and very drabbled muslin, holding a conversation that neither would ever forget. Yet it was perfectly commonplace; Harding girls are not given to the expression of their deeper emotions, though it must not therefore be inferred that they do not have any to express.

“Oh, Betty, you can’t imagine how dreadful it was out there!” Eleanor was saying. “And I thought I should have to stay all night, of course. How did you know I hadn’t come in?”

Betty explained.

“I don’t see why you bothered,” said Eleanor. “I’m sure I shouldn’t have, for any one as horrid as I’ve been. Oh, Betty, will you truly forgive me?”

“Don’t say that. I’ve wanted to do something that would make you forgive me.”

“Oh, I know you have,” broke in Eleanor quickly. “Miss Ferris told me.”

“She did!” interrupted Betty in her turn. “Why, she promised not to.”

“Yes, but I asked her. It seemed to me queer that she should have taken such an interest in me, and all of a sudden it flashed over me, as I sat talking to her, that you were at the bottom of it. So I said, ‘Miss Ferris, Betty Wales asked you to say this to me,’ and she said, ‘Yes, but she also asked me not to mention her having done so.’ I was ashamed enough then, for she’d made me see pretty plainly how badly I needed looking after, but I was bound I wouldn’t give in. Oh, Betty, haven’t I been silly!”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings by what I said at that class meeting, Eleanor,” said Betty shyly.

“You didn’t hurt them. I was just cross at things in general–at myself, I suppose that means,–and angry at you because I’d made you despise me, which certainly wasn’t your fault.”

“Eleanor, what nonsense! I despise you?”

A rustling on the bank reminded Betty that Katherine was waiting. “We must go home,” she said. “It’s after midnight.”

“So it is,” agreed Eleanor, getting up stiffly. “Oh, Betty, I am glad I’m not out there hanging on to that branch and shivering and wondering how soon I should have to let go and end it all. Oh, I shall never forget the feel of that stifling mist.”

They walked home almost in silence. Katherine, missing the murmur of conversation, wondered if this last effort at reconciliation had failed after all; but near Mrs. Chapin’s the talk began again.

“I’m only sorry there isn’t more of spring term left to have a good time in. Why, Eleanor, there’s only two weeks.”

“But there’s all next year,” answered Eleanor.

“I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“I wasn’t, but I am now. I’ve got to–I can’t go off letting people think that I’m only a miserable failure. The Watson pride won’t let me, Betty.”

“Oh, people don’t think anything of that kind,” objected Betty consolingly.

“I know one person who does,” said Eleanor with decision, “and her name is Eleanor Watson. I decided while I was out there waiting for you that one’s honest opinion of herself is about as important as any outsider’s. Don’t you think so?”

“Perhaps,” said Betty gaily. “But the thing that interests me is that you’re coming back next year. Why, it’s just grand! Shall you go on the campus?”

CHAPTER XX
LOOSE THREADS

“Well, it’s nice that you’re on,” said Helen wistfully. “I don’t suppose I have the least chance for next year.”

“Oh, there’s all summer,” said Betty hopefully. “Lots of people drop out at the last minute. Which house did you choose?”

“I didn’t choose any because Miss Stuart told me I would probably have to wait till junior year, and I thought I might change my mind before then.”

“It’s too bad,” said Betty, picking her way between trunk trays and piles of miscellaneous débris to the door. “I think I shall stop on my way home and get a man to move my furniture right over to the Hilton.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely if I’d got into the Hilton house too!” said Helen with a sigh of resignation. “Then perhaps we could room together.”

“Yes,” said Betty politely, closing the door after her. Under the circumstances it was not necessary to explain that Alice Waite and she had other plans for the next year.

It was a relief to stop trying to circumvent the laws of nature by forcing two objects into the space that one will fill–which is the cardinal principle of the college girl’s June packing–and Betty strolled slowly along under the elm-trees, in no haste to finish her errand. On Main Street, Emily Davis, carrying an ungainly bundle, overtook her.

“I was afraid I wasn’t going to see you to say good-bye,” she said. “Everybody wants skirt braids put on just now, and between that and examinations I’ve been very busy.”

“Are those skirts?” asked Betty.

“Yes, two of Babbie’s and one of Babe’s. I was going up to the campus, so I thought I’d bring them along and save the girls trouble, since they’re my best patrons, as well as being my good friends.”

“It’s nice to have them both.”

“Only you hate to take money for doing things for your friends.”

“Where are you going to be this summer?” inquired Betty. “You never told me where you live.”

“I live up in northern New York, but I’m not going home this summer. I’m going to Rockport—”

“Why, so am I!” exclaimed Betty. “We’re going to stay at The Breakers.”

“Oh, dear!” said Emily sadly, “I was hoping that none of my particular friends would be there. I’m going to have charge of the linen-room at The Breakers, Betty.”

“What difference does that make?” demanded Betty eagerly. “You have hours off, don’t you? We’ll have the gayest sort of a time. Can you swim?”

“No, I’ve never seen the ocean.”

“Well, Will and Nan will teach you. They’re going to teach me.”

Emily shook her head. “Now, Betty, you must not expect your family to see me in the same light that you do. Here those things don’t make any difference, but outside they do; and it’s perfectly right that they should, too.”

“Nonsense! My family has some sense, I hope,” said Betty gaily, stopping at the entrance to the Main Building. “Then I’ll see you next week.”

“Yes, but remember you are not to bother your family with me. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye. You just wait and see!” called Betty, climbing the steps. Half-way up she frowned. Nan and mother would understand, but Will was an awful snob. “He’ll have to get used to it,” she decided, “and he will, too, after he’s heard her do ‘the temperance lecture by a female from Boston.’ But it will certainly seem funny to him at first. Why, I guess it would have seemed funny to me last year.”

The registrar looked up wearily from the litter on her desk, as Betty entered. “Good-afternoon, Miss Wales. I sent for you because I was sure that, however busy you might be you had more time than I, and I can talk to you much quicker than I could write. As I wrote you, I have reached your name on the list of the campus applicants, and you can go into the Hilton if you choose. But owing to an unlooked-for falling out of names just below yours, Miss Helen C. Adams comes next to you on the list. You hadn’t mentioned the matter of roommates, and noticing that you two girls live in the same house, I thought I would ask you if you preferred a room in the Belden house with Miss Adams. There are two vacancies there, and she will get one of them in any case.”

“Oh!” said Betty.

“I shall be very glad to know your decision to-night if possible, so that I can make the other assignment in the morning, before the next applicant leaves town.”

“Yes,” said Betty.

“You will probably wish to consult Miss Adams,” went on the registrar. “I ought to have sent for her too–I don’t know why I was so stupid.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Betty hastily. “I will come back in about an hour, Miss Stuart. I suppose there isn’t any hope that we could both go into the Hilton.”

“No, I’m afraid not. Any time before six o’clock will do. I shan’t be here much longer, but you can leave the message with my assistant. And you understand of course that it was purely on your account that I spoke to you. I thought that under the circumstances—” The registrar was deep in her letters again.

But as Betty was opening the door, she looked up to say with a merry twinkle in her keen gray eyes, “Give my regards to your father, Miss Wales, and tell him he underrates his daughter’s ability to take care of herself.”

“Oh, Miss Stuart, I hoped you didn’t know I was that girl,” cried Betty blushing prettily.

Miss Stuart shook her head. “I couldn’t come to meet you, but I didn’t forget. I’ve kept an eye on you.”

“I hope you haven’t seen anything very dreadful,” laughed Betty.

“I’ll let you know when I do,” said Miss Stuart. “Good-bye.”

Betty went out on to the campus, where the shadows were beginning to grow long on the freshly mown turf, and took her favorite path back to the edge of the hill, where she sat down on her favorite seat to consider this new problem. On the slope below her a bed of rhododendrons that had been quite hidden under the snow in winter, and inconspicuous through the spring, had burst into a sudden glory of rainbow blossoms–pink and white and purple and flaming orange.

“Every day is different here,” thought Betty, “and the horrid things and the lovely ones always come together.”

Helen would be pleased, of course; as she had hinted to the registrar, there was really no need of consulting Helen; the only person to be considered was Betty Wales. If only Miss Stuart had assigned her to the Hilton house and said nothing!

From her seat Betty could look over to Dorothy King’s windows. It would have been such fun to be in the house with Dorothy. Clara Madison was going to leave the campus and go to a place where they would make her bed and bring her hot water in the morning. Alice’s room was a lovely big one on the same floor as Dorothy’s, and she had delayed making arrangements to share it with a freshman who was already in the house, until she was sure that Betty did not get her assignment. Eleanor had applied for an extra-priced single there, too, to be near Betty.

Helen was a dear little thing and a very considerate roommate, but she was “different.” She didn’t fit in somehow, and it was a bother always to be planning to have her have a good time. She would be lonely in the Belden; she loved college and was very happy now, but she needed to have somebody who understood her and could appreciate her efforts, to encourage her and keep her in touch with the lighter side of college life. She didn’t know a soul in the Belden–but then neither did lots of other freshmen when they moved on to the campus. She need never hear anything about the registrar’s plan, and she could come over to the Hilton as much as she liked.

Nita Reese would be at the Belden, and Marion Lawrence; and Mary Brooks was going there if she could get an assignment. It was a splendid house, the next best to the Hilton. But those girls were not Dorothy King, and Miss Andrews was not Miss Ferris. It would have been lovely to be in the house with Miss Ferris.

Would have been! Betty caught herself suddenly. It wasn’t settled yet. Then she got up from her seat with quick determination. “I’ll stop in and see Miss Ferris for just a minute, and then I shall go back and tell Miss Stuart right off, for I must finish packing to-night, whatever happens.”

Miss Ferris was in, and she and her darkened, flower-scented room wore an air of coolness and settled repose that was a poignant relief after the glaring sunshine outside and the confusion of “last days.”

“So you go to-morrow,” said Miss Ferris pleasantly. “I don’t get off till next week, of course. Are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied?” repeated Betty. She had heard of Miss Ferris’s habit of flashing irrelevant questions at her puzzled auditors, but this was her first experience of it.

“With your first year at Harding,” explained Miss Ferris.

“Oh!” said Betty, relieved that it was no worse. “Why, y-es–no, I’m not. I’ve had a splendid time, but I haven’t accomplished half that I ought. Next year I’m going to work harder from the very beginning, and—” Betty stopped abruptly, realizing that all this could not possibly interest Miss Ferris.

“And what?”

“I didn’t want to bore you,” apologized Betty. “Why, I’m going to try to–I don’t know how to say it–try not scatter my thoughts so. Nan says that I am so awfully interested in every one’s else business that I haven’t any business of my own.”

“I see,” said Miss Ferris musingly. “That’s quite a possible point of view. Still, I’m inclined to think that on the whole we have just as much orange left and it tastes far better, if we give a good deal of it away. If we try to hang on to it all, it’s likely to spoil in the pantry before we get around to squeeze it dry.”

Betty looked puzzled again.

“You don’t like figures of speech, do you?” said Miss Ferris. “You must learn to like them next year. What I mean is that it seems to me far better in the long run to be interested in too many people than not to be interested in people enough. Of course, though, we mustn’t neglect to be sufficiently interested in ourselves; and how to divide ourselves fairly between ourselves and the rest of the world is the hardest question we ever have to answer. You’ll be getting new ideas about it all through your course–and all through your life.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Betty rose to go. “I have to pack and I know you are busy. Miss Ferris, I’m going to be at the Belden next year.”

“I’m sorry you’re not coming here,” said Miss Ferris kindly. “Couldn’t you manage it?”

“Yes, but the–the orange seems to cut better the other way,” said Betty. “That isn’t a good figure, but perhaps you can see what it means.”

It was worth most of what it had cost to see Helen’s face when she heard the news. “Oh Betty, it’s too good to be true,” she cried, “but are you sure you want me?”

“Haven’t I given up the Hilton to be with you?” said Betty, with her face turned the other way.

Alice was disappointed, but she would be just as happy with Constance Fayles. She found more “queer” things to like at Harding every day, and she considered Betty Wales one of the queerest and one of the nicest.

Eleanor pleased Betty by offering no objection to the change of plan. “Only you needn’t think that you can get rid of me as easily as all this,” she said. “I shall camp down in the registrar’s office until she says that ‘under the circumstances,’ which is her pet phrase, she will let me change my application to the Belden. By the way, Betty, Jean Eastman wants to see you after chapel to-morrow. She said she’d be in number five.”

After “last chapel,” with its farewell greetings, that for all but the seniors invariably ended with a cheerful “See you next September,” and the interview with Jean, in which the class president offered rather unintelligible apologies for “the stupid misunderstanding that we all got into,” Betty went back to the house to get her bags and meet Katherine, who was going on the same train. Some of the girls had already gone, and none of them were in but Rachel, who was perched in a front window watching anxiously for a dilatory expressman, and Katherine, who was frantically stowing the things that would not go in her trunk into an already well-filled suit-case.

“Well, it’s all over,” said Betty, sitting down on the window seat beside Rachel.

“Wish it were,” muttered Katherine, shutting the case and sitting down on it with a thud.

“No, it’s only well begun,” corrected Rachel.

“A lot of things are over anyway,” persisted Betty. “Just think how much has happened since last September!”

“Jolly nice things too,” said Katherine cheerfully. She had quite unexpectedly succeeded in fastening the lock.

“Weren’t they!” agreed Betty heartily. “But I guess the nicest thing about it is what you said, Rachel–that it’s ‘to be continued in our next.’ Won’t it be fun to see how everything turns out?”

“I wish that expressman would turn up,” said Rachel ruefully.

“We’ll tell him so if we meet him,” said Betty, shouldering her bag and her golf clubs, while Katherine staggered along with the bursting suit-case.

As they boarded a car at the corner, Mary Brooks and the faithful Roberta waved to them energetically from the other side of Main Street.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” shrieked Katherine.

“See you next September,” called Betty, who had said good-bye to them once already.

“Katherine Kittredge has grown older this year,” said Mary critically, “but Betty hasn’t changed a bit. I remember the night she came up the walk, carrying those bags.”

“She has changed inside,” said Roberta.

As the car whizzed by the Main Building, Betty wanted to wave her hand to that too, but she didn’t until Dorothy King, appearing on the front steps, gave her an excuse.

“Well,” she said with a little sigh, as the campus disappeared below the crest of the hill, “you and Rachel may talk all you like, but I feel as if something was over, and it makes me sad. Just think! We can never be freshmen at Harding again as long as we live.”

“Quite true,” said Katherine calmly, “but we can be sophomores–that is, unless the office sees fit to interfere.”

“Yes, we can be sophomores; and perhaps that’s just as nice,” said Betty optimistically. “Perhaps it’s even nicer.”

The Books in this Series are: