upon her cheek, had
stepped down from the Chapel platform into ovation and adulation, to
find herself the centre of a homeward group jostling for place beside
her. Hattie had carried her books, Rosalie her jacket. William had
nodded to her at one corner, to be waiting at the next, where he nodded
again with an incidental carelessness of manner, and joined the group.
Emily Louise had stolen a glance at William, anxiously. Had William's
opinion of her fallen? It would seem not.

Yet Isobel had gone home alone. Emily Louise had seen her starting, with
sidewise glance and lingering saunter should any be meaning to overtake
her. But she had gone on alone.

"Because she never told," said Hattie.

"Until she wanted to be chosen," said Rosalie.

"But I never told," said Emily Louise.

Hattie was final. "It's different," said Hattie.

"Oh, very," said Rosalie.

They travel through labyrinthian paths who seek for understanding.

The sun went down; the dusk grew chill. Emily Louise sat on the
door-step, chin in palm.

A BALLAD IN PRINT O' LIFE

Double names are childish things; therefore Emmy Lou entered the high
school as Emily MacLauren.

Her disapproval of the arrangements she found there was decided.
High-school pupils have no abiding place, but are nomadic in their
habits and enforced wanderers between shrines of learning, changing
quarters as well as teachers for every recitation; and the constant
readjustment of mood to meet the varied temperaments of successive
teachers is wearing on the temper.

Yet there is a law in the high school superior to that of the teacher.
At the dictates of a gong, classes arise in the face of a teacher's
incompleted peroration and depart. As for the pupils, there is no rest
for the soles of their feet; a freshman in the high school is a mere
abecedarian part of an ever-moving line, which toils, weighted with
pounds of text-books, up and down the stairways of knowledge, climbing
to the mansard heights for rhetoric, to descend, past doors to which it
must later return, to the foundation floor for Ancient History.

Looking back at the undulating line winding in dizzy spiral about the
stairways, Emily, at times, seemed to herself to be a vertebrate part of
some long, forever-uncoiling monster, one of those prehistoric,
seen-before-in-dreams affairs. She chose her figures knowingly, for she
was studying zoology now.

Classes went to the laboratory fo