wash your dirty
little hands for supper. Hurry up!"

And did Nancy and Jennie care what the girls said to them now? Not a bit
of it!

They went up the stairs and through the long corridor with their arms
around each other. And Jennie insisted upon taking Nancy to her room to
fix up for supper.

"We'll only run across Cora in Number 30--and I don't want to have to
slap her face!" declared the still wrathful Jennie.

"Then I'll help you pack up your things to bring to Number 30," said
Nancy.

"Oh, not before supper, Nance!" cried Jennie, in horror. "I could go out
and bite a piece off the stone step, and swallow it right down, I'm so
hungry."

For the first time since she had come to Pinewood Hall, Nancy Nelson
went down to supper with her arm around another girl's waist, and
another girl's arm around hers.

Jennie Bruce boldly sat beside her, too, although she belonged at
another table. And they whispered together, and giggled, and were even
reproved by one of the teachers--which was likewise a new experience for
Nancy, and perhaps did her no particular harm.

"Ah-ha, Miss Mousie!" said Corinne, pausing by the new chums as she
made her tour of inspection, and pinching Nancy's ear; "I see now I
shall have both you and Bruce to watch. But don't you two go too far."

Really, a brand new existence had opened for Nancy. Jennie's ready
championship of her did much to influence the opinion of the other
girls; and the story Grace Montgomery and Cora Rathmore spread regarding
Nancy fell rather flat.

The Montgomery clique, after all, embraced only a very few of the
freshman class and some half dozen or more sophs. The latter had no
influence at all in Nancy's class for, naturally, it was "war to the
knife" between the freshies and the class immediately above them in the
school.

Corinne, too, after the grand explosion in which the Madame herself had
taken part, saw to it more particularly that the Montgomery crowd did
not "pick on" Nancy. If Jennie was about, however, that was sufficient.
Jennie Bruce would fight for her friend at the least provocation.

Yet, after all, Nancy was not entirely easy in her mind. That the story
of her being a "mere nobody" had failed to make her ostracised by the
better class of Pinewood Hall girls, was a delightful fact.

Yet the story was true. Nancy _was_ nobody; as the Montgomery and Cora
said, her parents _might_ be people of no morals nor breeding. There
_might_ be some grea