this room and said I must chum with the
girl who was here."

"It's not so! I don't believe you!" cried Cora. "And that stuck-up
thing,--that French-Canadian smartie!--just did it to be mean. I'm
going to Madame----"

Nancy really hoped she would. She hoped with all her heart that it would
prove a mistake that Cora Rathmore was chummed with her. She knew very
well now that her suspicions had justification in fact. This girl was a
most unpleasant roommate.

At that moment the door banged open and another girl came flying in.

"Oh, Cora! have you found out? We can't do it?"

"Found out what?" snapped Cora.

"We can't pick our rooms as we did last spring. Grace has been sent
clear over into the other corridor, and is paired with a greeny----Say,
who's _this_?"

"Oh, I don't know!" said Cora, sullenly sitting down. "It's just too
mean! I've got to stop here, I suppose."

"And they've taken Belle from me and given me Annie Gibbons," cried the
visitor. "And Annie snores--horridly!"

"It's a hateful place," snarled Cora Rathmore.

"I wish my folks hadn't sent me here," groaned the other.

"I'd run away--for half a cent," declared the Rathmore girl.

"Where would you run to?" demanded her friend.

"Anywhere. To the city. I don't care. Pinewood Hall isn't going to be
any fun at all, if we can't pair off as we choose."

"Who's your chum?" asked the visitor again, eyeing Nancy, who had
returned to her own side of the room and had turned her back to them.

"Oh, I don't know. Some _nobody_, of course!"

The words cut Nancy to the heart. The very phrase, uttered by chance,
was the one she had feared most in coming to Pinewood Hall.

"Oh," thought she, "if they say that of me already, what _will_ they say
when they find that I really have no home and no folks?"

CHAPTER X

"WHO IS SHE, ANYWAY?"

The curfew bell sent the younger girls to their rooms a few moments
later; but Cora Rathmore went to bed without speaking to her roommate.
And Nancy felt too unhappy herself to try to overcome the other girl's
reticence.

The girl from Higbee School had had so many adventures that day that she
could not at once go to sleep. She lay awake a long time after Cora's
heavy and regular breathing assured her that her companion in Number 30
was in the land of dreams.

She heard the gong at ten which demanded silence and "lights out" of the
girls on the upper dormitory floors. Then a list-slippered teacher went
thro