n with whom she
might exchange amused glances. "Did you ever see such colossal
unconcern?" she whispered, as if the pictured Lloyd could hear.

For a moment she thought she would get up and do the things she had
intended doing when she came up stairs, but it required too much of an
effort to dress again, and she was more tired than she had realized
after her exciting day. So she lay still. She began to get drowsy
presently, but she could not go to sleep with that irritating light in
her eyes. She threw a counterpane over the foot-board, but it was too
low to shield her. Finally in desperation she slipped out of bed and got
her umbrella. Then opening it over her she thrust its handle under the
pillow to hold it in place, and lay back under its sheltering canopy
with a suppressed giggle.

[Illustration: "LAY BACK UNDER ITS SHELTERING CANOPY WITH A SUPPRESSED
GIGGLE."]

Again she looked up at Lloyd's picture, thinking, "I'd have been awfully
mad if you hadn't been here to smile with me over it."

The bulb began to sway, throwing shadows across the wall. Ethelinda had
struck the cord in reaching up to pull her pillows higher. The
flickering shadows made Mary think of something--a verse that Lloyd had
written in her autograph album once, because it was the motto of the
Seminary Shadow Club.

"This learned I from the shadow on a tree
That to and fro did sway upon the wall,
Our shadowy selves--our influence, may fall
Where we can never be."

She repeated it drowsily, peering out from under her umbrella at the
swaying shadows, till something the lines suggested made her sit up,
wide awake.

"Why, I can take _you_ for my chum, of course," she thought. "Your
_shadow-self_. Then it won't make any difference whether Miss
Haughtiness Hurst talks to me or not, _You'll_ understand and sympathize
with me."

All her life when Mary's world did not measure up to her expectations,
she had been in the habit of making a world of her own; a beautiful
make-believe place that held all her heart's desires. It had given her
gilded coaches and Cinderella ball-attire in her nursery days, and
enchanted orchards whose trees bore all manner of confections. It had
bestowed beauty and fortune and accomplishments on her, and sent dashing
cavaliers to seek her hand when she came to the romance-reading age.
Friends and social pleasures were hers at will when the lonely desert
life grew irksome. Whatever was dull the Midas