ogether anyway," Peter whispered.

"Then I guess I'll stay here," she whispered back, "because next I
would have to go to Aunt Beulah's."

Peter, turning involuntarily in Beulah's direction, saw the look of
chagrin and disappointment on her face, and realized how much she
minded playing a losing part in the game and yet how well she was
doing it. "She's only a straight-laced kid after all," he thought.
"She's put her whole heart and soul into this thing. There's a look
about the top part of her face when it's softened that's a little like
Ellen's." Ellen was his dead fiancee--the girl in the photograph at
home in his desk.

"I guess I'll stay here," Eleanor said aloud, "all in one place, and
study with Mademoiselle."

It was a decision that, on the whole, she never regretted.

CHAPTER XIII

BROOK AND RIVER

"Standing with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet."

"I think it's a good plan to put a quotation like Kipling at the top
of the page whenever I write anything in this diary," Eleanor began in
the smart leather bound book with her initials stamped in black on the
red cover--the new private diary that had been Peter's gift to her on
the occasion of her fifteenth birthday some months before. "I think it
is a very expressive thing to do. The quotation above is one that
expresses me, and I think it is beautiful too. Miss Hadley--that's my
English teacher--the girls call her Haddock because she does look
rather like a fish--says that it's undoubtedly one of the most
poignant descriptions of adolescent womanhood ever made. I made a note
to look up adolescent, but didn't. Bertha Stephens has my dictionary,
and won't bring it back because the leaves are all stuck together
with fudge, and she thinks she ought to buy me a new one. It is very
honorable of her to feel that way, but she never will. Good old
Stevie, she's a great borrower.

"'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.'
"Shakespeare.

"Well, I hardly know where to begin. I thought I would make a resume
of some of the events of the last year. I was only fourteen then, but
still I did a great many things that might be of interest to me in my
declining years when I look back into the annals of this book. To
begin with I was only a freshie at Harmon. It is very different to be
a sophomore. I can h