ly. "I'll set my wits to work this evening as soon as I've
finished looking over the A class themes. Because none of the girls has
ever done such a thing before in the school is no reason why you should
not. Look! This is what I came in to show you."

It was several pages from Lloyd's last letter, and the samples of some
new dresses she was having made. For a little space the wolf at the door
drew in its claws, and Mary forgot her financial straits. Early in the
term Betty had divined how much the sharing of this correspondence meant
to Mary. She could not fail to see how eagerly she followed the winsome
princess through her gay social season in town, rejoicing over her
popularity, interested in everything she did and wore and treasuring
every mention of her in the home papers. The old Colonel sent Betty the
_Courier-Journal_, and the society page was regularly turned over to
Mary. There was a corner in her scrap-book marked, "My Chum," rapidly
filling with accounts of balls, dinners and house-parties at which she
had been a guest. This last letter had several messages in it for Mary,
so Betty left the page containing them with her, knowing they would be
folded away in the scrap-book with the samples, as soon as her back was
turned.

"I was out at Anchorage for this last week-end," ran one of the
messages. "And it rained so hard one night that what was to have been an
informal dance was turned into an old-fashioned candy-pull. Not more
than half a dozen guests managed to get there. Tell Mary that I tried to
distinguish myself by making some of that Mexican pecan candy that they
used to have such success with at the Wigwam. But it was a flat failure,
and I think I must have left out some important ingredient. Ask her to
please send me the recipe if she can remember it."

"Probably it failed because she didn't have the real Mexican sugar,"
said Mary, at the end of the reading. "It comes in a cone, wrapped in a
queer kind of leaf, so I'm sure she didn't have it. I'll write out the
recipe as soon as I get back from my geometry recitation, and add a
foot-note, explaining about the sugar."

Somehow it was hard for Mary to keep her mind on lines and angles that
next hour. She kept seeing a merry group in the Wigwam kitchen. Lloyd
and Jack and Phil Tremont were all ranged around the white table,
cracking pecans, and picking out the firm full kernels, while Joyce
presided over the bubbling kettle on the stove. She wondered if