eflection in the still water.

"Oh, we can," Rose answered. "But no one likes it very much. They'd
rather do their swimming in the swimming pool. There's a mud bottom to
the lake, and the water, though it looks mighty nice, isn't good to
drink."

While they were speaking two girls whom the chums remembered having seen
in the dining hall but did not know came down to the dock, and, after
waving to Rose and Connie, went to a rack and started to take down one
of the canoes.

The girls watched rather wistfully while they slipped it from the rack,
removed the cover, and slid it into the smooth water.

One girl with a skill born of experience jumped into the front seat of
the canoe, lifted one of the paddles and waited while her companion
settled herself in the stern seat. Then they glided from the dock
softly, almost silently but for the dip of the paddles in the water, and
drifted out toward the middle of the lake.

"Oh, if we could only do that," sighed Billie, "I think I'd die happy."

"Those girls are instructors," Connie explained. "They are in the first
grade and expect to graduate in the spring."

"It's funny, I suppose," said Billie, dreamily gazing up at the blood
red sun that was slowly sinking in the western sky, "but I'm really
sorry for them."

"Why?" they asked, surprised.

"Because," said Billie soberly, "they have to graduate and leave Three
Towers!"

CHAPTER XI

LIGHTS OUT

The girls sat up till the very last minute that night, discussing the
absorbing happenings of the day. Rose left them to talk to some of the
other girls--a fact for which they were thankful--and Nellie and Connie
Danvers went to their dormitory, leaving the three chums alone at last.

They had had supper, a meal not as good as lunch, for the meat had been
too crisp, almost burned in fact, and then they had come up to the
dormitory for a good time together.

They were rather disgruntled to find that Amanda Peabody and Eliza Dilks
were there before them, but even that fact could not bother them
much--not to-night!

"I tell you what let's do," said Billie, patting her brown curls into
place before her mirror and noticing with surprise how flushed her face
was and how her eyes sparkled. How could she know, being modest, that
not only her friends, but almost all the girls that had seen them
together, thought her even prettier than Rose Belser.

"What?" asked Vi, sinking down on the edge of her bed with a sigh of
c