hope had failed her;
Ethel had shown good cause why she should not act as Eleanor's adviser
and Betty had no idea what to do next.

"Hello, Betty Wales! Christy and I thought we saw you up at the golf
club this afternoon." Nita Reese's room overlooked the street and she
was hanging out her front window.

"I was up there," said Betty soberly, "but I had to come right back. I
didn't play at all."

"Then I should say it was a waste of good time to go up," declared Nita
amiably. "You'd better be on hand to-morrow. The juniors are going to be
awfully hard to beat."

"I'll try," said Betty unsmilingly, and Nita withdrew her head from the
window, wondering what could be the matter with her usually cheerful
friend.

At the corner of Meriden Place Betty hesitated. Then, noticing that Mrs.
Chapin's piazza was full of girls, she crossed Main Street and turned
into the campus, following the winding path that led away from the
dwelling-houses through the apple orchard. There were seats along this
path. Betty chose one on the crest of the hill, screened in by a clump
of bushes and looking off toward Paradise and the hills beyond. There
she sat down in the warm spring dusk to consider possibilities. And yet
what was the use of bothering her head again when she had thought it all
over in the afternoon? Arguments that she might have made to Ethel
occurred to her now that it was too late to use them, but nothing else.
She would go back to Dorothy, explain why she could not speak to Eleanor
herself, and beg her to take back the responsibility which she had
unwittingly shifted to the wrong shoulders. She would go straight off
too. She had found an invitation to a spread at the Belden house
scrawled on her blotting pad at dinner time, and she might as well be
over there enjoying herself as here worrying about things she could not
possibly help.

As she got up from her seat she glanced at the hill that sloped off
below her. It was the dust-pan coasting ground. How different it looked
now in its spring greenery! Betty smiled at the memory of her mishap.
How nice Eleanor had been to her then. And Miss Ferris! If only Miss
Ferris would speak to Eleanor. "Why, perhaps she will," thought Betty,
suddenly remembering Miss Ferris's note. "I could ask her to, anyway.
But--she's a faculty. Well, Ethel is too, though I never thought of it."
And Dorothy had wanted Betty's help in keeping the matter out of the
hands of the authorities. "But this