the
minister stalking back and forth in the yard, his hands clasped behind,
his head thrown back raptly. He could not see her in her dark room, but
she pulled the shade down softly and fled to her hard little bed. Was
that man going to obsess her vision everywhere, and must she try to like
him just because he was a minister?

So at last she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VII

The next day was filled with unpacking and with writing letters home. By
dint of being very busy Margaret managed to forget the minister, who
seemed to obtrude himself at every possible turn of the day, and would
have monopolized her if she had given him half a chance.

The trunks, two delightful steamer ones, and a big packing-box with her
books, arrived the next morning and caused great excitement in the
household. Not since they moved into the new house had they seen so many
things arrive. Bud helped carry them up-stairs, while Cap ran wildly
back and forth, giving sharp barks, and the minister stood by the front
door and gave ineffectual and unpractical advice to the man who had
brought them. Margaret heard the man and Bud exchanging their opinion of
West in low growls in the hall as they entered her door, and she
couldn't help feeling that she agreed with them, though she might not
have expressed her opinion in the same terms.

The minister tapped at her door a little later and offered his services
in opening her box and unstrapping her trunks; but she told him Bud had
already performed that service for her, and thanked him with a finality
that forbade him to linger. She half hoped he heard the vicious little
click with which she locked the door after him, and then wondered if she
were wicked to feel that way. But all such compunctions were presently
forgotten in the work of making over her room.

The trunks, after they were unpacked and repacked with the things she
would not need at once, were disposed in front of the two windows with
which the ugly little room was blessed. She covered them with two Bagdad
rugs, relics of her college days, and piled several college pillows from
the packing-box on each, which made the room instantly assume a homelike
air. Then out of the box came other things. Framed pictures of home
scenes, college friends and places, pennants, and flags from football,
baseball, and basket-ball games she had attended; photographs; a few
prints of rare paintings simply framed; a roll of rose-bordered white
scrim like her