t against Scarborough.

"It was contemptible," she said hotly. "It was treachery! It was a
piece of cold-blooded ambition. He'd sacrifice anything, any one, to
ambition. I shall never like him again."

Pierson was puzzled--being in love with her, he had been deceived by
her pretense that she had a poor opinion of him; and he did not
appreciate that her sense of justice was now clouded by resentment for
his sake. At dinner, when the four were together, she attacked
Scarborough. Though she did not confess it, he forced her to see that
at least his motives were not those she had been attributing to him.
When he and Pauline were alone--Olivia and Pierson had to hurry away to
a lecture he said: "What do YOU think, Miss Gardiner? You--did you--do
you--agree with your cousin?

"I?" Pauline dropped her eyes. "Oh, I----"

She hesitated so long that he said: "Go on--tell me just what you
think. I'd rather know than suspect."

"I think you did right. But--I don't see how you had the courage to do
it."

"That is, you think I did right--but the sort of right that's worse
than wrong."

"No--no!" she protested, putting a good deal of feeling into her voice
in the effort to reassure him. "I'd have been ashamed of you if you
hadn't done it. And--oh, I despise weakness in a man most of all! And
I like to think that if everybody in college had denounced you, you'd
have gone straight on. And--you WOULD!"

Within a week after this they were calling each the other by their
first names.

For the Christmas holidays she went with her mother from Battle Field
direct to Chicago, to her father's sisters Mrs. Hayden--Colonel
Gardiner had been called south on business. When she came back she and
Scarborough took up their friendship where they had left it. They read
the same books, had similar tastes, disagreed sympathetically, agreed
with enthusiasm. She saw a great deal of several other men in her
class, enough not to make her preference for him significant to the
college--or to herself. They went for moonlight straw-rides, on
moonlight and starlight skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks
over the hills--all invariably with others, but they were often
practically alone. He rapidly dropped his rural manners and
mannerisms--Fred Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical
of the surface changes in him.

Late in February his cousin, the superintendent of the farm,
telegraphed him to come home. He fou