d succeeded in making the big
fellow go back to the mistresses' part of the buildings.

Jack stuck to the new girl for the rest of that evening, much to
Geraldine's gratitude. She even went so far as to accompany her to the
door of the Pink Dormitory when the time came to go to bed, although
her own dormitory, the Green Dormitory, was in quite a different part
of the house.

"I couldn't do it another night because Alice Metcalfe, my dormitory
monitress, is frightfully strict. But she isn't back yet--not coming
till to-morrow, so I may as well make hay while the sun shines.
Besides, it's first night, and nobody takes very much account of rules
the first night," Jack remarked, still chattering gaily in the new
girl's ear. In all her school career, Jack Pym had never before come
across such a splendid listener as Geraldine Wilmott, and she was
forming all sorts of plans in her own mind as to her future
relationship with the new girl.

Just before the Pink Dormitory was reached, the lights in the corridor
went out with a suddenness that was rather alarming because it was so
very unexpected. As a matter of fact, two mischievous juniors had
stayed behind and switched them off at the bottom of the stairs for a
joke; but the majority of the girls did not guess this, and much
laughing and confusion and screaming took place. Geraldine did not
actually scream, but she was very near to losing her self-control, and
her hand shot out and grasped the arm of the girl next to her with a
tense grip which showed how very nearly her command of herself was gone.

The darkness only lasted for a moment. An irate senior hurried back to
the switch-board and turned the lights on again, and the culprits
decamped with all possible speed. Geraldine came to her senses again,
and found to her horror that the girl whose arm she was clasping was
not, as she had imagined, Jack Pym, but Phyllis Tressider, who was
staring at her with undisguised amazement in her blue eyes. With a
hasty apology the new girl loosened her grip of the other's arm, but
that one moment of revelation had been enough for Phyllis.

"I say, did you see?" she said in a low voice to Dorothy Pemberton.
"That new girl's face--it was as white as white! If she'd seen a ghost
she couldn't have looked more scared. What on earth was the matter
with her, do you think?"

Dorothy nodded in a satisfied way.

"I saw," she said. "And she was scared too! Downright funky at
fin