dded her head without answering. She was thinking of little
Anne Pierson and what a close race they were running together. Even
studying harder than she had ever had to do before, Miriam found it
difficult to keep up with Anne.

"Where are they going?" asked the other girl suddenly, after they had
walked along a few minutes in silence.

"Where are who going?" asked Miriam.

"Why, the nutting party, of course."

Here was Miriam's chance for revenge. The sophomores were a famously
mischievous class, and this girl was one of its ringleaders. Back in
Grammar School days they had played many pranks on their school fellows,
and even in their freshman year they had dared to turn off all lights,
one night at a dance of older schoolmates.

"If I tell, you won't give me away, will you?" asked Miriam.

"I promise," said the older girl.

"Very well, then. They meet at three-thirty at the Omnibus House on the
River road."

"Good," said the sophomore. "Don't you want to come along and see the
fun?"

"Don't count on me," answered Miriam, turning in at her gate, with mixed
feelings of shame and triumph.

The Omnibus House, which had been chosen by Grace as the class meeting
place, was an old stone building standing in the middle of an orchard.
It was now in ruins, but tradition set it down as a former inn and stage
coach station built before the days of railroads, and finally burned by
the Indians. There was a curious hieroglyphic sign cut in a stone slab
in the front wall which one of the High School professors interested in
archaeology had deciphered as follows: "Peace and Justice Reign Over
Mount Asia Tavern."

Here the crowd of High School "plebes," as the sophomores scornfully
dubbed them, met in conclave, partly to gather nuts in the woods near
by, partly to discuss class matters, but chiefly to enjoy the crisp
autumn weather. The woods were still gorgeous in russets and reds, in
spite of the recent heavy frosts, and there was a smell of burning
leaves and dry bracken in the air. The girls skipped about like young
ponies.

"If this is childish," cried Grace, "then I'd like to be a child always,
for I shall play in the woods when the notion strikes me, even if I'm a
grandmother."

There was a smothered snicker at this from the inside of the old stone
house, but the girls were too intent on their enjoyment to notice it.

"Young ladies," exclaimed Nora O'Malley, trailing her cape after her to
make her skirts look