al 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,