for Peggy.

Then came busy days of preparation for Peggy and Polly, for the outcome
of that fireside powwow had been a decision in favor of Columbia Heights
School for Polly also, for that winter at least, and when the fifteenth
dawned bright and frosty, Mrs. Harold accompanied the girls to
Washington, Captain Stewart's leave having meantime expired. But he had
gone back to his ship in a very different frame of mind from that in
which he had returned to it in July, and with a comforting sense of
security in the outcome of his present plans for Peggy. The longer he
knew Mrs. Harold the greater became his confidence in her judgment, and
she had assured him that Peggy should be her charge that winter exactly
as Polly was. Moreover, Mrs. Harold had persuaded Mrs. Howland to close
her house in Montgentian for the winter and come to Annapolis, bringing
Gail with her, for Constance had decided to follow the _Rhode Island_
whenever it was possible for her to do so, and this decision left Mrs.
Howland and Gail alone in their home. So to Wilmot Hall came Polly's
mother and pretty sister, the former to spend a delightfully restful
winter with her sister and the latter to take her first taste of the
good times possible for a girl of twenty-one at the Naval Academy.

The first breaking away from Severndale was harder for Peggy than anyone
but Mrs. Harold guessed. Somehow intuition supplied to her what actual
words could never have conveyed, even had they been spoken, but Peggy,
once her resolution had been taken to go away to school, was not a girl
to bewail her decision. And now she was a duly registered pupil at
Columbia Heights with Polly for her room-mate in number 67, her
next-door neighbor Natalie Vincent, Mrs. Vincent's daughter, a jolly,
honest, happy-go-lucky girl, who looked exactly as her mother must have
looked at fifteen. A long line of rooms extended up and down, both sides
of the corridor, the end one, No. 70, with its pretty bay-window
overlooking the lawn and Stony Brook beyond, was occupied by Stella
Drummond, a tall, striking brunette of eighteen. To the hundred-fifty
girls in Columbia Heights School this story can only allude in a brief
way but of those who figure most prominently in Polly's and Peggy's new
world we'll let Polly give the general "sizing-up." These girls were all
about the same age, and, excepting Stella, juniors, as were Peggy and
Polly, whose previous work under tutors and in high school had qu