at he spent the summer at the same place that
you did?" asked little Helen Adams.

Mary started. "Who told you that?" she demanded anxiously.

"Nobody but Lucile," explained Betty in soothing tones. "She visited
there for a week, and this afternoon just by chance she happened to
speak of seeing him. It fitted in beautifully, you see. She doesn't know
you were there too, so it's all right."

Mary gave a relieved little sigh, and then, turning suddenly, fell upon
the row of pitiless inquisitors, embracing as many as possible and
smiling benignly at the rest. "Oh, girls, he's a dear," she said. "He's
worth twenty of the gilded youths you meet out in society." She drew
back hastily. "But we're only good friends," she declared. "He's been
down a few times to spend Sunday--that was how I heard about the
lecture--but he comes to see father as much as to see me--and--and you
mustn't gossip."

"We won't," Katherine promised for them all. "You can trust us. We
always seem to have a faculty romance or two on our hands. We're
getting used to it."

"But it's not a romance," wailed Mary. "He took me walking and driving
because mother asks him to dinner. We're nothing but jolly good
friends."

"Nothing but jolly good friends--"

That was the last thing Mary said when, late the next afternoon, her
"little friends" waved her off for home.

"Isn't she just about the last person you'd select for a professor's
wife?" said Helen, as Mary's stylish little figure, poised on the rear
platform of the train, swung out of sight around a curve.

"No, indeed she isn't," declared Roberta loyally. "She'll be a fine one.
She's awfully clever, only she makes people think she isn't, because she
knows how to put on her clothes."

"And it's one mission of the modern college girl," announced Madeline
oracularly, "to show the people aforesaid that the two things can go
together. Let's go to Smuggler's Notch Monday to celebrate."

CHAPTER VI

HELEN ADAMS'S MISSION

The particular mission that Madeline had discovered for the modern
college girl was one that Helen Chase Adams would never probably do much
to fulfil. But Helen had a mission of her own--the mission of being
queer. Sometimes she hated it, sometimes she laughed at it, always it
seemed to her a very humble one, but she honestly tried to live up to
its responsibilities and to make the most of the opportunities it
offered.

The loneliness of Helen's freshman year had made an