thing, and I don't believe a word she says!"
Priscilla declared stoutly, as she kissed poor crushed little Rosalie
goodnight.

This slight _contretemps_ marked the beginning of strained relations.
Mae Mertelle gathered her own adherents, and Rosalie's special coterie
of friends rallied to the standard of their queen. They intimated to
Mae's followers that the quality of the romance was quite different in
the two cases. Mae might be the heroine of any number of commonplace
flirtations, but Rosalie was the victim of a _grande passion_. She was
marked with an indelible scar that she would carry to the grave. In the
heat of their allegiance, they overlooked the crookedness of the hero's
nose and the avowed fact that Rosalie's own affections had not been
engaged.

But Mae's trump card had been withheld. Whispers presently spread about
under the seal of confidence. She was hopelessly in love. It was not a
matter of the past vacation, but of the burning present. Her room-mate
wakened in the night to hear her sobbing to herself. She had no
appetite--her whole table could testify to that. In the middle of
dessert, even on ice-cream nights, she would forget to eat, and with her
spoon half-raised, would sit staring into space. When reminded that she
was at the table, she would start guiltily and hastily bolt the rest of
the meal. Her enemies unkindly commented upon the fact that she always
came to before the end, so she got as much as anybody else.

The English classes at St. Ursula's were weekly drilled in the
old-fashioned art of letter writing. The girls wrote letters home,
minutely descriptive of school life. They addressed imaginary girl
friends, and grandmothers and college brothers and baby sisters. They
were learning the great secret of literary forcefulness--to suit their
style to their audience. Ultimately, they arrived at the point of
thanking imaginary young men for imaginary flowers. Mae listened to the
somewhat stilted phraseology of these polite and proper notes with a
supercilious smile. The class, covertly regarding her, thrilled anew.

Gradually, the details of the romance spread abroad. The man was
English--Mae had met him on the steamer--and some day when his elder
brother died (the brother was suffering from an incurable malady that
would carry him off in a few years) he would come into the title; though
just what the title was, Mae had not specifically stated. But in any
case, her father was a staunch Am