at one side. She continued to stare at the picture while Ruth put before her the suggestion of work at the Red Mill.

"Oh, of course, Miss Fielding, I'd be glad of the work. And you're very liberal. But you don't know anything about me."

"No. And I shouldn't know much more about you if you brought a dozen recommendations," laughed Ruth.

"I suppose not—Miss." It seemed hard for the girl to get out that "Miss," and Ruth, who was keenly observant, wondered if she really had been accustomed to using it.

They talked it over and finally reached an agreement. Aunt Alvirah was sweetly grateful to Ruth, knowing full well that there must have been a "battle royal" between the miller and his niece before the former had agreed to the new arrangement.

Ruth was quite sure that Maggie was a nice girl, even if she was queer. At least, she gave deference to the quaint little old housekeeper, and seemed to like Aunt Alvirah very much. And who would not love the woman, who was everybody's aunt but nobody's relative?

Once or twice Ruth found Maggie poring over the Year Book of Ardmore College, rather an odd interest for a girl of her class. But Maggie was rather an odd girl anyway, and Ruth forgot the matter in her final preparations for departure.

CHAPTER III

EXPECTATIONS

"I expect she'll be a haughty, stuck-up thing," declared Edith Phelps, with vigor.

"'Just like that,'" drawled May MacGreggor. "We should worry about the famous authoress of canned drama! A budding lady hack writer, I fancy."

"Oh, dear me, no!" cried Edith. "Didn't you see 'The Heart of a Schoolgirl' she wrote? Why, it was a good photo-play, I assure you."

"And put out by the Alectrion Film Corporation," joined in another of the group of girls standing upon the wide porch of Dare Hall, one of the four large dormitories of Ardmore College.

The college buildings were set most artistically upon the slope of College Hill, each building facing sparkling Lake Remona. Save the boathouse and the bathing pavilions, Dare and Dorrance Halls at the east side of the grounds, and Hoskin and Hemmingway Halls at the west side, were the structures nearest to the lake.

Farther to the east an open grove intervened between the dormitories and the meadows along the Remona River where bog hay was cut, and which were sometimes flooded in the freshet season.

To the west the lake extended as far as the girls on the porch could see, a part of its sparkling surface being hidden by the green and hilly bulk of Bliss Island. The shaded green lawns of the campus between Dare and Hoskin Halls were crossed by winding paths.

A fleshy girl who was near the group but not of it, had been viewing this lovely landscape with pleasure. Now she frankly listened to the chatter of the "inquisitors."

"Well," Edith Phelps insisted, "this Ruth Fielding was so petted at that backwoods' school where she has been that I suppose there will be no living in the same house with her."

Edith was one of the older sophomores—quite old, indeed, to the eyes of the plump girl who was listening. But the latter smiled quietly, nevertheless, as she listened to the sophomore's speech.

"We shall have to take her down a peg or two, of course. It's bad enough to have the place littered up with a lot of freshies——"

"Just as we littered it up last year at this time, Edie," suggested May, with a chuckle.

"Well," Edith said, laughing, "if I don't put this Ruth Fielding, the authoress, in her place in a hurry, it won't be because I sha'n't try."

"Have a care, dearie," admonished one quiet girl who had not spoken before. "Remember the warning we had at commencement."

"About what?" demanded two or three.

"About that Rolff girl, you know," said the thoughtful girl.

"Oh! I know what you mean," Edith said. "But that was a warning to the sororities."

"To everybody," put in May.

"At any rate," Dora Parton said, "Dr. Milroth forbade anything in the line of hazing."

"Pooh!" said Edith. "Who mentioned hazing? That's old-fashioned. We're too ladylike at Ardmore, I should hope, to haze—my!"

"'My heye, blokey!'" drawled May.

"You are positively coarse, Miss MacGreggor," Dora said, severely.

"And Edie is so awfully emphatic," laughed the Scotch girl. "But she will have to take it out in threatenings, I fear. We can't haze this Fielding chit, and that's all there is to it."

"Positively," said the quiet girl, "that was a terrible thing they did to Margaret Rolff. She was a nervous girl, anyway. Do you remember her, May?"

"Of course. And I remember being jealous because she was chosen by the Kappa Alpha as a candidate. Glad I wasn't one if they put all their new members through the same rigmarole."

"That is irreverent!" gasped Edith. "The Kappa Alpha!"

"I see Dr. Milroth took them down all right, all right!" remarked another of the group. "And now none of the sororities can solicit members among either the sophs or the freshies."

"And it's a shame!" cried Edith. "The sorority girls have such fun."

"Half murdering innocents—yes," drawled May. "That Margaret Rolff was just about scared out of her wits, they say. They found her wandering about Bliss Island——"

"Sh! We're not to talk of it," advised Edith, with a glance at the fat girl in the background who, although taking no part in the discussion, was very much amused, especially every time Ruth Fielding's name was brought up.

"Well, I don't know why we shouldn't speak of it," said Dora Parton, who was likewise a sophomore. "The whole college knew it at the time. When Margaret Rolff left they discovered that the beautiful silver vase was gone, too, from the library——"

"Oh, hush!" exclaimed May MacGreggor, sharply.

"Won't hush—so now!" said the other girl, smartly, making a face at the Scotch lassie. "Didn't Miss Cullam go wailing all over the college about it?"

"That's so," Edith agreed. "You'd have thought it was her vase that had been stolen."

"I don't believe the vase was stolen at all," May said. "It was mixed up in that initiation and lost. I know that the Kappa Alpha girls are raising a fund to pay for it."

"Pay for it!" scoffed some one. "Why, they couldn't do that in a thousand years. That was an Egyptian curio—very old and very valuable. Pay for it, indeed! Those Kappa Alphas, as well as the other sororities, are paying for their fun in another way."

"But, anyway," said the quiet girl, "it was a terrible experience for Miss Rolff."

"Unless she 'put it on' and got away with the loot herself," said Edith.

"Oh, scissors! now who's coarse?" demanded May MacGreggor.

But the conversation came back to the expected Ruth Fielding. These girls had all arrived at Ardmore several days in advance of the opening of the semester. Indeed, it is always advisable for freshmen, especially, to be on hand at least two days before the opening, for there is much preparation for newcomers.

The fleshy girl who had thus far taken no part in the conversation recorded, save to be amused by it, had already been on the ground long enough to know her way about. But she was not yet acquainted with any of her classmates or with the sophomores.

If she knew Ruth Fielding, she said nothing about it when Edith Phelps began to discuss the girl of the Red Mill again.

"Miss Cullam spoke to me about this Fielding. It seems she has an acquaintance who teaches at that backwoods' school the child went to——"

"Briarwood a backwoods' school!" said May. "Not much!"

"Well, it's somewhere up in New York State among the yaps," declared Edith. "And Cullam's friend wrote her that Fielding is a wonder. Dear me! how I do abominate wonders."

"Perhaps we are maligning the girl," said Dora. "Perhaps Ruth Fielding is quite modest."

"What? After writing a