Martin
added severely: "I've got my opinion of _you_--after all Genevieve has
just done for us! I'm sure, I think it was lovely of her to speak to
that boy like that!"

Tilly flushed uncomfortably. Her tongue had gone much farther than she
had intended it to go. She did not like to think, either, of that Texas
trip just then. But the very shame that she felt made her only the more
determined not to show it--then.

"Pooh! there wasn't a thing I said that anybody need to make such a fuss
about," she declared loftily; then, as she spied Harold Day coming
toward them, she called in a merry voice: "Seen the new boy, Harold? His
name is 'O. B. J. Holmes.' _I_ say his name is 'O Be Joyful,' and the
girls are shocked at my disrespect."

"Is that so?" laughed Harold. "Well, I'm not sure I'd like that name
myself very well--even if 'tis a cheerful one! Where's Genevieve? One
doesn't often see one of you without all of you."

"Oh, she was here, but she's gone. She was the most shocked of all,"
answered Tilly, with mock humility. "Probably she's gone to tell him so.
You see, she shook hands with him and introduced us all around, and said
she'd like to welcome him and that she hoped he'd enjoy it here."

"Oh, Tilly!" remonstrated Cordelia.

"Why, Cordelia, didn't she?" asked Tilly, in a particularly innocent
tone of voice.

"Y-yes," admitted Cordelia, reluctantly, "only--" The bell rang and the
group broke up, with Cordelia's sentence still unfinished.

The rest of the day for the Happy Hexagons was not an easy one. Tilly
looked rebellious--and ashamed. Cordelia looked ready to cry. Genevieve
kept her eyes on her books and seemed unaware that there was such a
thing in the world as a girls' club, of which she was a prominent
member. Bertha, Elsie, and Alma divided their time between scowling at
Tilly and trying to attract Genevieve's attention.

It was during the Latin recitation, which came just before closing time
at noon, that Cordelia's perturbation culminated in a blunder that sent
most of the class into convulsive giggles, and even brought a twitching
smile to Genevieve's tense lips.

Cordelia, rising to translate in her turn, hurried blindly through a
paragraph until she came to the words "sub jugum". Now Cordelia very
well knew what "sub jugum" meant; but her eyes, at the moment, were
divided between her book and Genevieve's flushed cheeks, and so saw,
apparently, but half of the word "jugum". At all events, the