only two
with safety, that the girls would perhaps be startled if she spoke to
them, and also that she had come down to Paradise largely to escape
Lil's importunate demands that she spend a month of her vacation at the
Day camp in the Adirondacks. So, certain that they would never notice
her in the darkness and the thick shadows, she lay still in the bottom
of her boat and waited for them to go on.

"It's a pity about her, isn't it?" said Miss Payson, after she had
rubbed her ankle for a while in silence.

"About whom?" inquired Lilian crossly.

"Why, Eleanor Watson; you just spoke of having an engagement with her.
She seems to have been a general failure here."

Eleanor started at the sound of her own name, then lay tense and rigid,
waiting for Lilian's answer. She knew it was not honorable to listen,
and she certainly did not care to do so; but if she cried out now, after
having kept silent so long, Lilian, who was absurdly nervous in the
dark, might be seriously frightened. Perhaps she would disagree and
change the subject. But no----

"Yes, a complete failure," repeated Lilian distinctly. "Isn't it queer?
She's really very clever, you know, and awfully amusing, besides being
so amazingly beautiful. But there is a little footless streak of
contrariness in her--we noticed it at boarding-school,--and it seems to
have completely spoiled her."

"It is queer, if she is all that you say. Perhaps next year she'll
be----"

"Oh, she isn't coming back next year," broke in Lilian. "She hates it
here, you know, and she sees that she's made a mess of it, too, though
she wouldn't admit it in a torture chamber. She thinks she has shown
that college is beneath her talents, I suppose."

"Little goose! Is she so talented?"

"Yes, indeed. She sings beautifully and plays the guitar rather
well--she'd surely have made one of the musical clubs next year--and she
can act, and write clever little stories. Oh, she'd have walked into
everything going all right, if she hadn't been such a goose--muddled her
work and been generally offish and horrid."

"Too bad," said Miss Payson, rising with a groan. "Who do you think are
the bright and shining stars among the freshmen, Lil?"

"Why Marion Lustig for literary ability, of course, and Emily Davis for
stunts and Christy Mason for general all-around fineness, and
socially--oh, let me think--the B's, I should say, and--I forget her
name--the little girl that Dottie King is so fond of. H