about it now, I suppose; and if it isn't true, why it isn't; so I
think I'll go to basket-ball," and she detached Miss Madison and started
off.

Betty gave a prolonged sigh. "I must go too," she said. "I've promised
to study Latin. I presume it isn't any use, but I can't disappoint
Rachel. I wish I was a fine student like Rachel. She won't be one of the
fifty."

Alice, who had been in a brown study, emerged, just as Betty turned
away.

"Wait a minute," she commanded. "Of course it's awfully queer up here,
but still, if they have exams. I don't see the use of cooking it all up
beforehand. I mean I don't see the use of exams. if it is all decided."

Her two friends brightened perceptibly.

"That's a good idea," declared Betty. "Every one says the mid-years are
so important. Let's do our best from now on, and perhaps the faculty
will change their minds."

As she walked home, Betty thought of Eleanor. "She'll be dreadfully
worried. I shan't tell her a word about it," she resolved. Then she
remembered Mary Brooks's remark. Yes, no doubt some one else would
enlighten Eleanor. It was just too bad. But perhaps Mary was right and
the story was only a story.

It is hard for freshmen on the eve of their mid-year examinations to be
perfectly calm and philosophical. The story of the fifty unfortunates
ran like wild-fire through the college, and while upper-class girls
sniffed at it as absurd and even freshmen, particularly the clever ones,
pooh-poohed it in public, it was the cause of many anxious, and some
tearful moments. Betty, after her first fright, had accepted the
situation with her usual cheerfulness, and so had Alice and Rachel, who
could not help knowing that her work was of exceptionally high grade,
while Helen irritated her house-mates by affecting an anxiety which, as
Katherine put it, "No dig, who gets 'good' on all her written work, can
possibly feel." Katherine was worried about her mathematics, in which
she had been warned before Thanksgiving, but she confided to Betty that
she had counted them up, and without being a bit conceited she really
thought there were fifty stupider girls in the class of 19--. Roberta
and the Riches, however, were utterly miserable, and Eleanor wrote to
Paul West that she was busy--she had written "ill" first, and then torn
up the note--and indulged in another frantic fit of industry, even more
violent than its predecessors had been.

"But I thought you wanted to go home," said B