year wore on, and nobody knew, or at least no one paid any attention
to the fact, that Olivia Copeland was homesick and unhappy. Her
room-mates thought that they had done their duty when they occasionally
asked her to play golf or go skating with them (an invitation they were
very safe in giving, as she knew how to do neither). Her instructors
thought that they had done their duty when they called her up to the
desk after class and warned her that her work was not as good as it had
been, and that if she wished to pass she must improve in it.

The English class was the only one in which she was not warned; but she
had no means of knowing that her themes were handed about among the
different instructors and that she was referred to in the department as
"that remarkable Miss Copeland." The department had a theory that if
they let a girl know she was doing good work she would immediately stop
and rest upon her reputation; and Olivia, in consequence, did not
discover that she was remarkable. She merely discovered that she was
miserable and out of place, and she continued to drip tears of
homesickness before a sketch of an Italian villa that hung above her
desk.

It was Patty Wyatt who first discovered her. Patty had dropped into the
freshmen's room one afternoon on some errand or other (probably to
borrow alcohol), and had idly picked up a pile of English themes that
were lying on the study table.

"Whose are these? Do you care if I look at them?" she asked.

"No; you can read them if you want to," said Lady Clara. "They're
Olivia's, but she won't mind."

Patty carelessly turned the pages, and then, as a title caught her eye,
she suddenly looked up with a show of interest. "'The Coral-fishers of
Capri'! What on earth does Olivia Copeland know about the coral-fishers
of Capri?"

"Oh, she lives somewhere near there--at Sorrento," said Lady Clara,
indifferently.

"Olivia Copeland lives at Sorrento!" Patty stared. "Why didn't you tell
me?"

"I supposed you knew it. Her father's an artist or something of the
sort. She's lived in Italy all her life; that's what makes her so
queer."

Patty had once spent a sunshiny week in Sorrento herself, and the very
memory of it was intoxicating. "Where is she?" she asked excitedly. "I
want to talk to her."

"I don't know where she is. Out walking, probably. She goes off walking
all by herself, and never speaks to any one, and then when we ask her to
do something rational, like go