"Why?" demanded Eleanor.

"Public reason--trouble with my eyes; real reason--haven't touched my conditions yet and now I have been warned and told to tutor in three cla.s.ses. I can't possibly do it all."

"Why Caroline Barnes, do you mean you are sent home?"

Caroline nodded. "It amounts to that. I was advised to go home now, and work off the entrance conditions and come again next fall. I thought maybe you'd be taking the same train," she added with a nervous laugh.

Eleanor turned white. "Nonsense!" she said sharply. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you said you hadn't done anything about your conditions, and you've cut and flunked and sc.r.a.ped along much as I have, I fancy."

"I'm sorry, Caroline," said Eleanor, ignoring the digression. "I don't know that you care, though. You've said you were bored to death up here."

"I--I say a great deal that I don't mean," gulped Caroline. "Good-bye, Eleanor. Shall I see you in New York at Christmas? And don't forget--trouble with my eyes. Oh, the family won't mind. They didn't like my coming up in the first place. I shall go abroad in the spring.

Good-bye."

Eleanor walked swiftly back through the campus. In the main building she consulted the official bulletin-board with anxious eyes, and fairly tore off a note addressed to "Miss Eleanor Watson, First Cla.s.s." It had come--a "warning" in Latin. Once back in her own room, Eleanor sat down to consider the situation calmly. But the more she thought about it, the more frightened and ashamed she grew. Thanksgiving was next week, and she had been given only until Christmas to work off her entrance conditions. She had meant to leave them till the last moment, rush through the work with a tutor, and if she needed it get an extension of time by some specious excuse. Had the last minute pa.s.sed? The Latin warning meant more extra work. There were other things too. She had "cut" cla.s.ses recklessly--three on the day of the soph.o.m.ore reception, and four on a Monday morning when she had promised to be back from Boston in time for chapel. Also, she had borrowed Lil Day's last year's literature paper and copied most of it verbatim. She could make a sophistical defence of her morals to Betty Wales, but she understood perfectly what the faculty would think about them. The only question was, how much did they know?

When the dinner-bell rang, Eleanor pulled herself together and started down-stairs.

"Did you get your note, Miss Watson?" asked Adelaide Rich from the dining-room door.

"What note?" demanded Eleanor sharply.

"I'm sure I can't describe it. It was on the hall table," said Adelaide, turning away wrathfully. Some people were so grateful if you tried to do them a favor!

It was this incident which led Eleanor to hurry off after dinner, and again at the end of the play, bound to escape nerve-racking questions and congratulations. Later, when Betty knocked on her door, her first impulse was to let her in and ask her advice. But a second thought suggested that it was safer to confide in n.o.body. The next morning she was glad of the second thought, for things looked brighter, and it would have been humiliating indeed to be discovered making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

"The trouble with Caroline was that she wasn't willing to work hard,"

she told herself. "Now I care enough to do anything, and I must make them see it."

She devoted her spare hours on Monday morning to "making them see it,"

with that rare combination of tact and energy that was Eleanor Watson at her best. By noon her fears of being sent home were almost gone, and she was alert and exhilarated as she always was when there were difficulties to be surmounted.

"Now that the play is over, I'm going to work hard," Betty announced at lunch, and Eleanor, who was still determined not to confide in anybody, added nonchalantly, "So am I." It was going to be the best of the fun to take in the Chapin house.

But the Chapin house was not taken in for long.

"What's come over Eleanor Watson?" inquired Katherine, a few days later, as the girls filed out from dinner.

"She's working," said Mary Brooks with a grin. "And apparently she thinks work and dessert don't jibe."

"I'm afraid it was time," said Rachel. "She's always cutting cla.s.ses, and that puts a girl behind faster than anything else. I wonder if she could have had a warning in anything."

"I think she could----" began Katherine, and then stopped, laughing. "I might as well own up to one in math.," she said.

"Well, Miss Watson is going to stay here over Thanksgiving," said Mary Rich.

Then plans for the two days' vacation were discussed, and Eleanor's affairs forgotten, much to the relief of Betty Wales, who feared every moment lest she should in some way betray Eleanor's confidence.

On the Wednesday after Thanksgiving Eleanor burst in on her merrily, as she was dressing for dinner.

"I just wanted to tell you that some of those conditions that worry you so are made up," she said. "I almost wore out my tutor, and I surprised the history department into a compliment, but I'm through. That is, I have only math., and one other little thing."

"I don't see how you did it," sighed Betty. "I should never dare to get behind. I have all I want to do with the regular work."

Eleanor leaned luxuriously back among the couch cushions. "Yes," she said loftily. "I suppose you haven't the faintest idea what real, downright hard work is, and neither can you appreciate the joys of downright idleness. I shall try that as soon as I've finished the math."

"Why?" asked Betty. "Do you like making it up later?"

"I shouldn't have to. You know I'm getting a reputation as an earnest, thorough student. That's what the history department called me. A reputation is a wonderful thing to lean back upon. I ought to have gone in for one in September. I was at the Hill School for three years, and I never studied after the first three months. There's everything in making people believe in you from the first."

"What's the use in making people believe you're something that you're not?" demanded Betty.

"What a question! It saves you the trouble of being that something. If the history department once gets into the habit of thinking me a thorough, earnest student, it won't condition me because I fail in a written recitation or two. It will suppose I had an off day."

"But you'd have to do well sometimes."

"Oh, yes, occasionally. That's easy."

"Not for me," said Betty, "so I shall have to do respectable work all the time. But I shall tell Helen about your idea. She works all the time, and it makes her dull and cross. She must have secured a reputation by this time; and I shall insist upon her leaning back on it for a while and taking more walks."

CHAPTER IX

PAYING THE PIPER

"I feel as if there were about three days between Thanksgiving and Christmas," said Rachel, coming up the stairs, to Betty, who stood in the door of her room half in and half out of her white evening dress.

"That leaves one day and a half, then, before vacation," laughed Betty.

"I'm sorry to bother you when you're so pressed for time, but could you hook me up? Helen is at the library, and every one else seems to be off somewhere."

"Certainly," said Rachel, dropping her armful of bundles on the floor.

"I'm only making Christmas presents. Is the Kappa Phi dance coming off at last?"

"Yes--another one, that is; and Mr. Parsons asked me, to make up for the one I had to miss. Now, would you hold my coat?"

"Betty! Betty Wales! Wait a minute," called somebody just as Betty reached the Main Street corner, and Eleanor Watson appeared, also dressed for the dance.

"Why didn't you say you were going to Winsted?" she demanded breathlessly. "Good, here's a car."

"Why didn't you say you were going?" demanded Betty in her turn as they scrambled on.

"Because I didn't intend to until the last minute. Then I decided that I'd earned a little recreation, so I telegraphed Paul West that I'd come after all. Who is your chaperon?"