nual editor, honor girl,
commencement speaker, graduate fellow-heigho! She 'bore her blushing
honors thick upon her.' No wonder you look uplifted. Listen! Behold! Tell
me, do her little feet really touch the solid humble earth?"

As mischievous Bea stopped, with anxiety and awe written large on her
saucy features to investigate Berta's shoes, a door near them opened and
a slender woman with fast-graying hair and a curiously still face
emerged. There was the ghost of a twinkle in her gray eyes. The transom
had not been entirely closed.

"Miss Abbott, may I take that essay again, for a few minor suggestions?
If you will drop in after chapel I shall have it ready for you. Permit me
once more to congratulate you on its excellence and originality. It has
never been my pleasure to read any undergraduate work of greater
promise." She withdrew after the nicker of a quizzical smile in Bea's
direction.

That young lady gasped and then happening to notice that her mouth was
ajar carefully closed it with the aid of both hands.

"Berta Abbott! To have your essay praised by Miss Thorne the terrible,
who never approves of anything, and yet you stand there like a common
mortal! You live, you breathe, you walk, you talk, just the same as you
used to do! She says it has promise. I do believe that she never said as
much before about anybody except maybe Shakespeare when he was young. Oh,
just wait until she sees the Annual!"

Berta had colored hotly. "Bea, don't tell anybody, please. Of course, I
care what she says. I care most of all--I care heaps--about her opinion
that the qualities are--are promising. But if I should fizzle out and
never amount to anything! It's all in the future, you see, and I'd be so
ashamed to have the girls quoting her now. If I shouldn't win the
fellowship, if I had to go to teaching next year and give it up----"

Bea pounced upon her. "You're a nice sweet girl, and I love you to
distraction. Don't you worry about that fellowship, but trot up-stairs
with me this instant and help hammer the covers off those boxes. You'll
be surprised!"

"Shall I?" said Berta idly, as she followed in Bea's eddying wake, "I
don't see how, since I read the proof and corrected the lists of names."

"Hm!" Bea turned confidentially and shot an alarming sentence toward her
companion. "Well, I'll tell you; everything you wrote is signed. The
other editors did it last thing--sometimes your initials, sometimes your
name. It's for