tears suddenly started to Peggy’s eyes. She felt just at the moment, in spite of her bruises, all the beautiful thrill that is inspired by the discovery of absolute loyalty and affection in a room-mate. The autumn sunlight glinting down on Katherine’s yellow hair suddenly seemed to Peggy like a halo, and impulsively she reached toward her.

“It was fine of you, Katherine,” she said, “but I didn’t need saving—I was running because I was in a hurry to tell you people that the dinner is on. And Mr. Huntington doesn’t mind the grounds—I mean the grinds, but I’m so wounded I can’t talk straight,—and we’re to have it on Thanksgiving if Friend Forest will let us. Girls, he’s perfectly wonderful—”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Katherine, “and all that worry on my part for nothing.”

“And all your injuries for nothing, too,” sniggered Florence Thomas heartlessly. “You infants with your terribly impromptu manner of returning to our midst will be the death of me yet. Peggy, please draw a long, calm breath and then let us in on what really happened in Gloomy House.”

To an eager audience, then, Peggy told the whole outcome of her adventure, interrupting herself now and then to suggest, with some irrelevance certain dishes that would be particularly desirable as part of the dinner.

“Do you suppose Mrs. Forest will ever let us do such a novel sort of thing?” asked Katherine as the girls, after stamping out the remains of their little fire on the river rocks, gathered up their coats and sweaters to go back to the school.

“Not—for—a—minute.” Florence Thomas dashed their hopes with tones as firm as Mrs. Forest’s own might have been in speaking of the matter.

Peggy was rubbing her black and blue forehead thoughtfully.

“Peggy!” cried Katherine, “Florence doesn’t think Mrs. Forest will have it.”

Peggy smiled, a long, slow smile, and her black eyes narrowed to mere laughing slits. “She’ll be crazy about it,” she insisted.

It wasn’t until dinner time that the girls, in their dainty evening frocks, already seated at the various little tables, with the candles gleaming onto their flushed cheeks and powdered necks and arms through the pink candle shades, learned what Peggy intended to do to Mrs. Forest to make her prophecy come true. Some of the girls had declared she meant to try hypnotism, others poison, and some 

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