fellowmen?"

Nancy Leavitt, like the beloved Topsy, had just "growed up." To her
chums, in her own spirited way, she had once described how: "Ever since
I can remember there were always just Dad and I. When he wanted to go
anywhere he used to pick me up like a piece of baggage and off we went.
Half the time I didn't go to the same school two years in succession.
And he used to teach me, too. Oh, how homesick I was when I came
here--without him. We're just like pals!"

Nancy's physical well-being had been watched over by nurses of almost
every race and color. She knew a little Hindoo and from the old Hindoo
"ayah" she had caught bits of Hindoo mysticism. She had romped and
rolled with Japanese babies; she had lived on a ranch in Mexico until
bandits had driven them away; she had trudged along behind her father
over miles of trail in Alaska. And the only place she had ever called
"home" was a tiny flat in New York, where her father kept the pretty
furniture that Nancy's mother had bought when a bride. Back to this
they would come after long intervals, for a little respite from their
wanderings, and for Nancy the homecoming was always an excitingly happy
one from the moment she ran down to Mrs. Finnegan's door for the key to
the lugging out again of the two little trunks, which meant a sudden
departure for some distant land.

College had brought a great change into this gypsy life and a grief at
the separation from her "Dad." But as the weeks had passed her letters
to him read less and less like a wail of homesickness, and were filled
more and more with the college happenings and whole passages devoted to
girlish descriptions of her new friends.

For the last two years her father had been overseas as senior newspaper
correspondent with the American Expeditionary Force, and it would be
weeks before he could return. That thought added now to the lonely
ache in Nancy's heart as she stared at her chums and wondered what it
would seem like to live day after day without seeing them!

These three had trod together up the Paths of Learning until they were
passing now the Gateway of Life; and yet, right at that moment, all of
them, even Anne, felt childishly lonely and homesick for the shelter of
the University they were leaving.

That was why the chiming of the Library clock, that had marked the
passage of happy time for more than one generation of youth, brought a
shadow across each of the three young faces.

A