. The girls who hoped to graduate from the school in the coming
June must have more quiet--must have time to study and to think.

The younger girls, if they fell behind in their work, could make it up in
the coming terms. Not so Ruth Fielding and her friends, so the wise school
principal had distributed them, after the destruction of the West
Dormitory, in such manner that they would be free from the hurly-burly of
the general school life.

A few, like Mercy Curtis (who could not easily walk back and forth from
any outside lodging), Mrs. Tellingham kept in her own apartment. But the
greater number of the graduating class was distributed among neighbors
who--in most cases--were not averse to accepting good pay for rooms which
could only be let to summer boarders and were, at this time of year, never
occupied.

The Briarwood Hall preceptress allowed her girls to go only where she
could trust the land-ladies to have some oversight over their lodgers. And
the girls themselves were bound in honor to obey the rules of the school,
whether on the Briarwood premises or not.

Visiting among the outside scholars was forbidden, and the girls studying
for graduation had their hours more to themselves than they would have had
in the school.

Special chums were able to keep together in most instances. Ruth, Helen
and Ann Hicks went to live at Mrs. Sadoc Smith's; and there was room in
the huge front room on the second floor of her rambling old house, for
Mercy, too, had it been wise for the lame girl to lodge so far from the
school.

Mrs. Smith got the girls up in season in the morning to reach the dining
hall at Briarwood by breakfast-time; and she saw to it, likewise, that
their light went out at ten o'clock in the evening. These were her
instructions from Mrs. Tellingham, and Mrs. Sadoc Smith was rather a grim
person, who did her duty and obeyed the law.

There being an extra couch, Ruth persuaded her friends to agree to the
coming of a fourth girl into the lodging. And this fourth girl, oddly
enough, was not one of the graduating class, or even one of the girls
whom they had chummed with before.

It was the new girl, Amy Gregg! Amy Gregg, whom nobody seemed to want, and
who seemed to be the loneliest figure and the most sullen girl who had
ever come to Briarwood Hall!

"Of course, you'd pick up some sore-eyed kitten," complained Ann Hicks.
"That child has a fully-developed grouch against the whole world, I verily
believe