sturdy young arms.

"Now--sink or swim, survive or perish!" panted Marjorie, as the lapping
shallows broke over the yielding figure of her friend. "You'll simply
have to be a water baby, Connie, dear. It's as important as being a
sophomore in Sanford High, and you know just how important that is! Now,
watch me and do likewise."

Her day dream thus rudely interrupted, Constance Stevens laughingly
resigned herself to Marjorie's energetic commands, and, now thoroughly
awake to the important business at hand, tried her best to follow her
friend's instructions. A fifteen minutes' lesson in the art of learning
to float followed, and at the end of that time, by common consent, the
two girls waded ashore and flung themselves on the warm sand.

"I'll never learn to swim. I feel it in my bones," asserted Constance,
as she lazily rose, wrung the water from her bathing suit and seated
herself on the white beach beside Marjorie, who lay stretched at full
length, her head propped upon her elbows, her alert gaze upon the few
bathers who were disporting themselves in the water.

"Then your bones are false prophets," declared Marjorie calmly. "You
know how to float already, and that's half the battle. We'll rest a
little and talk some more, and then we'll try it again. Next time I'll
teach you an easy stroke. Isn't it funny, Connie, we never seem to get
'talked out.' We've been here together five whole weeks and yet there
always seems to be something new to say. You are really a most
entertaining person."

"That's precisely my opinion of you." Constance's blue eyes twinkled.

The two girls laughed joyously. Two wet hands stretched forth and met in
a loving little squeeze.

"It's been wonderful to be here with you, Marjorie. Last year at this
time I never dreamed that anything so wonderful could possibly happen to
me." The golden-haired girl's voice was not quite steady.

"And I've loved being here with you. What a lot of things can happen in
a year," mused Marjorie. "Why, at this time last year I never even knew
that there was a town called Sanford on the map, and when I found out
there was really such a place, and that I was going to live there
instead of staying in B---- and going to Franklin High, I felt perfectly
_awful_ about it."

It had, indeed, been a most unhappy period for sunny, lovable Marjorie
Dean when the call of her father's business had made it necessary for
him to remove his family from the beautiful city of