r town, do you, Cloudy? And I don't feel quite right
anywhere but home on Sunday, do you? For, really, all the Christian
Endeavor societies I've been to this summer acted as if their members
were all away on vacations and they didn't care whether school kept or
not."

And so they went home to begin another happy winter. But the very
first day there came a rift in their happiness in the shape of the new
professor of chemistry, a man about Julia Cloud's age, whom Ellen
Robinson had met on her visit to Thayerville, and told about her
sister. Ellen had suggested that maybe he could get her sister to take
him to board!

To this day Julia Cloud has never decided whether Ellen really thought
Julia would take a professor from the college to board, or whether she
just sent him there as a joke. There was a third solution, which Julia
Cloud kept in the back of her mind and only took out occasionally with
an angry, troubled look when she was very much annoyed. It was that
Ellen was still anxious to have her sister get married, and she had
taken this way to get her acquainted with a man whom she thought a
"good match". If Julia had been sure that this idea had entered into
her sister's thoughts, she might have slammed the door in Professor
Armitage's face that night when he had the audacity to come and ask to
be taken into Cloudy Villa as a boarder.

"Why, the very idea!" said Leslie with snapping eyes. "As if we wanted
a _man_ always around! No, indeed! _Horrors!_ Wouldn't that be
_awful_?"

But Professor Armitage, like everybody else who came once to Cloudy
Villa, liked it, and begged a thousand pardons for presuming, but came
again and again, until even the children began to like him in a way,
and did not in the least mind having him around.

But the day came at last, about the middle of the winter, or nearer to
the spring, when Leslie and Allison began to realize that Professor
Armitage came to see their Cloudy Jewel, and they met in solemn
conclave to talk it over.

CHAPTER XXV

It was out on a lonely road in the car that they had chosen to go
for their conference, where there was no chance of their being
interrupted; and they whirled away through the town and out to the
long stretch of whiteness in glum silence, the tears welling to
overflow in Leslie's eyes.

At last they were past the bounds where they were likely to meet
acquaintances, and Leslie broke forth.

"Do you really think it's true that we've g