o mark any
student unjustly; but I cannot help feeling that you have overestimated
Miss Copeland's ability. She has really had a chance to show what is in
her, and if she has failed in as many courses as you say--The college,
you know, must keep up the standard of its work, and in questions like
this it is not always possible to consider the individual."

Patty felt that she was being dismissed, and she groped about wildly for
a new plea. Her eye caught a framed picture of the old monastery of
Amalfi hanging over the bookcase.

"Perhaps you've lived in Italy?" she asked.

Miss Prescott started slightly. "No," she said; "but I've spent some
time there."

"That picture of Amalfi, up there, made me think of it. Olivia Copeland,
you know, lives near there, at Sorrento."

A gleam of interest flashed into Miss Prescott's eye.

"That's how I first came to notice her," continued Patty; "but she
didn't interest me so much until I talked to her. It seems that her
father is an artist, and she was born in Italy, and has only visited
America once when she was a little girl. Her mother is dead, and she and
her father live in an old villa on that road along the coast leading to
Sorrento. She has never had any girl friends; just her father's
friends--artists and diplomats and people like that. She speaks Italian,
and she knows all about Italian art and politics and the church and the
agrarian laws and how the people are taxed; and all the peasants around
Sorrento are her friends. She is so homesick that she nearly dies, and
the only person here that she can talk to about the things she is
interested in is the peanut man down-town.

[Illustration: Olivia Copeland]

"The girls she rooms with are just nice exuberant American girls, and
are interested in golf and basket-ball and Welsh rabbit and Richard
Harding Davis stories and Gibson pictures--and she never even _heard_ of
any of them until four months ago. She has a water-color sketch of the
villa, that her father did. It's white stucco, you know, with terraces
and marble balustrades and broken statues, and a grove of ilex-trees
with a fountain in the center. Just think of _belonging_ to a place like
that, Miss Prescott, and then being suddenly plunged into a place like
this without any friends or any one who even knows about the things you
know--think how lonely you would be!"

Patty leaned forward with flushed cheeks, carried away by her own
eloquence. "You know what Italy'