don’t even know what she looks like.”

“You’ll be so busy studying that you won’t have time to miss Lakeville,” assured Mr. Black. “Now run back like good girls so I can catch my train. I’ll send you a great big box of candy from Chicago tomorrow and new friends will flock about you like flies.”

Before many hours had passed, Mabel discovered that a strange roommate was not so bad after all because Isabelle Carew of Kentucky had arrived two days earlier and knew when to go to bed, when to get up, where to find the class rooms and most important of all, the dining room. Mabel thoroughly enjoyed imparting her new knowledge to her Lakeville friends.

Each day, they discovered, was divided into sections of forty minutes each, and each section was filled to the brim. A bell rang every forty minutes—Sallie had to ring it.

“And my goodness!” said weary Mabel, during visiting hour, when the five friends were stretched at length across Henrietta’s narrow bed, “it’s just awful to jump up and do something different every time that bell rings.”

“Never mind,” soothed Henrietta, “we don’t have to do a single thing from three in the afternoon until six, except on walking days. We don’t have to go to gym from two to three unless we want to. We don’t have to study evenings unless we like but except on dancing nights we have to stay in our own rooms and keep quiet in case anybody does want to study.”

“Or rest,” groaned Mabel.

“There’s kind of a woodsy grove over that way—south, I guess,” said Jean. “We can go as far as the road, Cora says. She’s that thin girl with freckles—an old girl. Sometimes you can find nuts; and, in the spring, there are lots of wild flowers.”

“Spring will never get here,” groaned Marjory.

“We aren’t allowed to go to town at all,” said Jean, “except sometimes to lectures and concerts at the Theological Seminary, and there’s a regular shopping day sometimes. Cora says it isn’t a bit like it was here last year—a great many things have been changed. All the teachers, for one thing. There’s a secret. Something happened, but she says that Doctor Rhodes took all the old girls into his office as soon as they came and made them promise not to tell the new girls—or anybody.”

“The teachers,” said Henrietta, “are a bunch of freaks and as near as I can make out most of them are related to Doctor Rhodes. I had physical geography from his poor old cousin, Emily Rhodes; and a music lesson from his daughter, Julia Rhodes.”

“His daughter-in-law, Mrs. Henry Rhodes, teaches painting and needlework,” said Jean. “She’s rather pleasant, I think.”

“Anyway,” said Mabel, “that French teacher isn’t related. And I don’t think Miss Woodruff is.”

Marjory sat up suddenly and giggled.

“What’s the joke?” demanded Henrietta.

“Mabel made friends with Miss Woodruff this morning in mathematics. She is just about the tallest and stoutest person you ever did see. Mabel asked her if she hadn’t been teaching a great many years. Miss Woodruff said, ‘Why, no; how old do you think I am?’ Mabel looked her up and down carefully and said: ‘About seventy-five.’”

“Oh, Mabel!”

“Well,” confessed Mabel, “I honestly didn’t see how anybody could grow to such a size in less than seventy-five years. Why! She’s the very biggest woman I ever saw.”

“She’ll have it in for you,” laughed Henrietta.

“I like Sallie Dickinson,” said Bettie. “But I’m sort of sorry for her, too. She has to give out all the mail because she’s the only person who never gets any and she has to help in the kitchen sometimes, cleaning silver and things like that. And ringing that horrid bell. It isn’t any wonder her legs are so thin—always running up and down stairs and through all those long halls.”

“I like Maude Wilder,” said Jean. “She’s full of fun and she throws stones just like a boy.”

“I don’t care about Isabelle,” confessed Mabel. “She says she’s engaged.”

“Engaged!” squealed Marjory. “How old is she?”

“About fifteen. She says southern girls are always engaged. She talked about nothing but boys last night and she says she’s afraid she’s falling in love with the history teacher—Mr. James Carter.”

“I saw him,” said Henrietta. “I should think if any man were perfectly safe from being fallen in love with, he was. He’s an ugly, near-sighted little brute with black whiskers and shabby shoes—another relative of Doctor Rhodes, Maude says. I guess Isabelle is just naturally sentimental like a silly maid Grandmother had once. She’ll have a sweet time getting sympathy out of Mabel, won’t she?”

“She’s writing sort of a continued letter to her Clarence,” laughed unsentimental Mabel. “He’s a silly looking thing, too. I saw his picture in her locket. She wears it night and day.”

“I suppose,” teased Henrietta, “you’re going to write to Laddie Lombard?”

“Of course I am, but that’s different. He’s just a regular boy—not a beau.”

“It’s time we were dressing for dinner,” said Jean, prodding her lazy companions. “We should have been outdoors all this time.”

“I’m worried about dinner,” confessed Mabel. “Sallie says that beginning with tonight we have to ask for everything in French and I don’t know enough French to ask for a stewed prune.”

“You don’t have to,” laughed Bettie, “we have those for breakfast.”

“It’s all right anyway,” said Marjory. “Cora says that the girls at our table have a secret code—Maude invented it as soon as she heard about the French. This is it. You punch your next door neighbor once for bread, twice for butter, three times for pickles, four times for potatoes. One pinch means sugar and two pinches for cream. We never get any more meat anyway so there isn’t anything for that. Of course you mustn’t get your pinches and punches mixed up. But isn’t that a grand scheme for beginners in French?”

“Ye-es,” admitted Mabel, doubtfully, “but you see, I sit next to Miss Woodruff. What if I forget and punch her?”

CHAPTER V—NEW ACQUAINTANCES

The French teacher, Madame Celeste Bolande, was easily the most interesting of all the teachers. She afforded the girls a vast deal of amusement as well as much annoyance. As a topic of conversation she was inexhaustible. She was truly wonderful to look at but the snapshots that the Miller girls took of her failed to do her justice.

“Doctor Rhodes must have ordered her by mail,” said Cora Doyle, after her first French lesson with the new teacher. “Phew! I’m glad to get outdoors. She was fairly drenched with perfume.”

“Yes,” agreed Debbie Clark. “Doctor Rhodes couldn’t have seen her first or he never would have taken her. What’s that stuff about a pig in a poke? Well, that’s how he got her. I’m sure she isn’t a relative, even by marriage.”

Madame Bolande was really amazing to look at and if the girls spoke of her disrespectfully it was not surprising. No properly brought up little girl could have respected that astonishing lady. Nature had been kind to her; she might have been entirely pleasing to the eye, but for several reasons she was not. She had quantities of black hair, apparently all her own, but it was always greasy and untidy as if it were never washed or brushed or combed. It hung about her face in oily loops that had a way of breaking loose at odd moments, at which times Madame would pin them carelessly in place and go on with the lesson.

Sometimes she wore so-called laced shoes,