out."

"Oh, I don't know," Ruth said from her end of the room, where she was
operating a chafing dish, "they send you away fast enough if you don't
keep the rules. You remember that Fanny Price, last year."

"Oh, well,--_that_, of course. Fanny Price hadn't any business here in
the first place." Annabel began to arrange the tea cups.

"Will you have lemon in your tea?" she asked. "Do you mind if we call
you Blue Bonnet? It's something of a mouthful, but I like it."

"Please do. I should love it. I take lemon, thank you."

"It's a good thing you do. Cream is an unknown quantity in this room. We
did have some Eagle Brand, but Ruth spread the last of it on her
crackers yesterday."

"On crackers?"

"Yes. Ever try it?"

Blue Bonnet made a face.

"Oh, it's not so bad. You'll come to it--some day when you're starving."

"Starving? Don't you get enough to eat here?"

"Yes--but it's not the Copley Plaza--exactly. We manage to get fat,
anyway. That reminds me--where's Wee? Go get her, Sue, and ask her to
bring over some Nabiscos, if she happens to have any handy. Wee's a
regular life-saving station, usually."

Sue dashed out of the room and came back in a minute with a very large,
stout girl, whom she introduced as her room-mate, Deborah Watts--better
known as "Wee."

Good nature, affability--all the essentials of comradeship--fairly oozed
from Deborah Watts. She took Blue Bonnet's hand in a grip that hurt,
but Blue Bonnet felt its sincerity and squeezed back.

A bright girl in the school had once compared Deborah Watts to a family
horse. Not a pretty comparison, but apt, when one knew Deborah.

The girl said that Deborah was safe, gentle, and reliable. Safe enough
to be trusted with old people; gentle enough for children; and that she
could, at times, get up enough ginger to give the young people a fair
run. The comparison went even farther. The girl declared that
sometimes--oh, very occasionally, under pressure and high
living--Deborah could kick up her heels and light out with the best, and
that when she did, people held up their hands in horror and said: "What
ever in the world has got into Deborah Watts!"

Her room-mate and friends had beheld her in this enviable state a number
of times, and had pronounced her--in boarding-school vernacular--a
perfect circus.

"Can you cook things in your room?" Blue Bonnet inquired of Ruth, gazing
at the chafing dish with the water steaming in it.

"You can have a cha