ere, take my arm,
Margaret. You've got to get home some way, you know."

Their voices trailed off into murmurs that grew fainter and fainter
until the silence of the river and the wood was again unbroken. Eleanor
sat up stiffly and stretched her arms above her head in sheer physical
relief after the strain of utter stillness. Then, with a little sobbing
cry, she leaned forward, bowing her head in her hands. Paradise--had
they named it so because one ate there of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge?

"A little footless streak!"

"An utter failure!"

What did it matter? She had known it all before. She had said those very
words herself. But she had thought--she had been sure that other people
did not understand it that way. Well, perhaps most people did not. No,
that was nonsense. Lilian Day had achieved a position of prominence in
her class purely through a remarkable alertness to public sentiment.
Margaret Payson, a girl of a very different and much finer type, stood
for the best of that sentiment. Eleanor had often admired her for her
clear-sightedness and good judgment. They had said unhesitatingly that
she was a failure; then the college thought so. Well, it was Jean
Eastman's fault then, and Caroline's, and Betty Wales's. Nonsense! it
was her own. Should she go off in June and leave her name spelling
failure behind her? Or should she come back and somehow change the
failure to success? Could she?

She had no idea how long she sat there, turning the matter over in her
mind, viewing it this way and that, considering what she could do if she
came back, veering between a desire to go away and forget it all in the
gay bustle of a New York winter, and the fierce revolt of the famous
Watson pride, that found any amount of effort preferable to open and
acknowledged defeat. But it must have been a long time, for when she
pulled herself on to her seat and caught up the paddle, she was
shivering with cold and her thin dress was dripping wet with the mist
that lay thick over the river. Slowly she felt her way down-stream,
pushing through the bank of fog, often running in shore in spite of her
caution, and fearful every moment of striking a hidden rock or snag.
Soft rustlings in the wood, strange plashings in the stream startled
her. Lower down was the bewildering net-work of islands. Surely there
were never so many before. Was the boat-house straight across from the
last island, or a little down-stream? Which was straight