"Yes, but perhaps I was mistaken," said Bob soothingly, "and any way I doubt if she ever says anything to you directly. She'll just drop judicious hints in the ears of your worldly friends, who can be trusted to appreciate the debt of grat.i.tude you owe her."

"Bob." Betty stared at her hard for a moment. "You don't think--oh, of course you don't! The parts in the play ought to go to the ones who can do them best and the committee ought not to think of anybody or anything but that."

"And I know at least one committee woman who won't think of anybody or anything but that," declared Bob loyally. "I only thought I'd tell you about Jean so that, if she should say anything, you would be ready for her. Now I must go and study Ba.s.sanio," and Bob departed murmuring,

"'What find I here?

Fair Portia's counterfeit?'"

in tones so amorous that Belden House Annie, who was sweeping on the stairs, dropped her dust-pan with a clatter, declaring that she was "jist overcome, that she was!"

"Which was the only compliment my acting of Ba.s.sanio ever got," Bob told her sadly afterward.

Betty was still hot with indignation over Bob's disclosures when Roberta Lewis knocked on the door. Roberta was wrapped up in a fuzzy red bath-robe, a brown sweater and a pink crepe shawl, and she looked the picture of shivering dejection.

"What in the world is the matter?" demanded Betty, emptying her history notebooks out of the easy-chair and tucking Roberta in with a green and yellow afghan, which completed the variegated color scheme to perfection.

"Please don't bother about me," said Roberta forlornly. "I'm going back in a minute. I've lost my wedding-pin--Miss Hale's wedding-pin--well, you know what I mean,--and caught a perfectly dreadful cold."

"You don't think that your pin was stolen?" asked Betty quickly. There had been no robberies in the college since Christmas, and the girls were beginning to hope that the mysterious thief had been discouraged by their greater care in locking up their valuables, and had gone off in search of more lucrative territory.

"Yes, I do think so," said Roberta. "I almost know it. You see I hadn't been wearing my pin. I only took it out to show Polly Eastman, because she hadn't happened to see one. Then K. came and we went off to walk. I left the pin right on my dressing-table and now it's gone. But the queerest part is that Georgia Ames was in my room almost all the time, because hers was being swept, and before that she was in Lucy Mann's, with the door wide open into the hall, and my door open right opposite.

And yet she never saw or heard anything. Isn't it strange?"

"She was probably busy talking and didn't notice," said Betty. "People are everlastingly tramping through the halls, until you don't think anything about it. Have you looked on the floor and in all your drawers?

It's probably tumbled down somewhere and got caught in a crack under the dressing-table or the rug."

"No, I've looked in all those places," said Roberta with finality. "You know I haven't as many things to look through as you."

"Please don't be sarcastic," laughed Betty, for Roberta's belongings were all as trim and tailor-made as herself. "How did you get your cold?"

"Why K. and I got caught in a miserable little snow flurry," explained Roberta, pulling the pink shawl closer, "and--I got my feet wet. My throat's horribly sore. It won't be well for a week, and I can't try for the play."

Roberta struggled out of the enc.u.mbering folds of the green afghan and trailed her other draperies swiftly to the window, whose familiar view she seemed to find intensely absorbing.

"Oh, yes, you can," said Betty comfortingly. "Why, your throat may be all right by to-morrow, and anyway it's only the Portia and Shylock trials that come then. Were you going to try for either of those parts?"

"Yes," gulped Roberta thickly.

Behind Roberta's back Betty was free to pucker her mouth into a funny little grimace that denoted amus.e.m.e.nt, surprise and sympathy, all together. "Then I'll ask Barbara Gordon to give you a separate trial later," she said kindly. "Nothing will be really decided to-morrow. We only make tentative selections to submit to Mr. Masters when he comes up next week. He's the professional coach, you know."

But Roberta turned back from the window to shake her head. "I wouldn't have you do that for anything," she said, brushing away the tears. "I'll try for something else if I get well in time. I'm going to bed now. Will you please ask Annie to bring up my dinner? And Betty, don't ever say I meant to try for Shylock. I don't know why I told you, except that you always understand."

Betty felt that she didn't quite understand this time, but she promised to tell Annie and come in late herself to conduct another search for the missing pin. She had just succeeded in dismissing Ted, Jean and Roberta from her mind and concentrating it on the next day's history lesson, when Helen Adams appeared.

"Helen," began Betty solemnly, "if you've got any troubles connected with trying for parts in the play, please don't divulge them. I don't believe I can stand any more complications."

"Poor thing!" said Helen compa.s.sionately. "I know how you feel from the times I have with the 'Argus.' Well, I shan't bother you about trying for a part. I should just love to act, but I can't and I know it. I only wanted to borrow some tea, and to tell you that Anne Carter has come to return my call. You know you said you'd like to meet her."

So Betty brushed her curls smooth and, stopping to pick up Madeline on her way, went in to meet Miss Carter, whose shyness and silence melted rapidly before Betty's tactful advances and Madeline's appreciative references to her verses in the last "Argus."

While Helen made the tea, Miss Carter amused them all with a droll account of her efforts to learn to play basket-ball, "because Miss Adams says it throws so much light on the philosophy of college life."

"Then you never played before you came here?" asked Betty idly, stirring her tea.

Miss Carter shook her head. "I prepared for college in a convent in Canada. The sisters would have been horribly shocked at the idea of our tearing about in bloomers and throwing a ball just like the boys."

"Oh!" said Betty, with a sudden flash of recognition. "Then it was at the convent where you got the beautiful French accent that mademoiselle raves over. You're in my senior French cla.s.s. I ought to have remembered you."

"I'm glad you didn't," said Miss Carter bitterly, and then she flushed and apologized. "I'm so ugly that I'm always glad not to be remembered or noticed. But I didn't mean to say so, and I do hope you'll come to see me, both of you,--if seniors ever do come to see soph.o.m.ores."

The girls laughingly a.s.sured her that seniors did sometimes condescend so far, and she went off with a happy look in her great gray eyes.

"We must have her in the 'Merry Hearts,'" said Madeline. "She's our kind if she can only get over that morbid feeling about her scar."

"But we must be very careful," Helen warned them, with a vivid remembrance of her first interview with Miss Carter. "We mustn't ask her to join until most of us have been to see her and really made friends.

She would just hate to feel that we pitied her."

"We'll be careful," Betty promised her. "I'll go to see her, for one, the very first of next week," and she skipped gaily off to dress for dinner. After all there were plenty of things in the world besides the cla.s.s play with its unhappy tangle of rivalries and heartburnings.

"And what's the use of borrowing trouble?" Betty inquired the next evening of the green lizard. "If you do, you never borrow the right kind."

Jean, to be sure, had done a good deal to justify Bob's theory. She had remembered an urgent message from home which must be delivered to Polly immediately after luncheon, and she kept her innocent little cousin busily engaged in conversation in the lower hall of the Belden House until Betty appeared, having waited until the very last minute in the vain hope of avoiding Jean. But when they opened the door there was Barbara Gordon, also bound for Miss Kingston's office, and much relieved to find that her committee were not all waiting indignantly for their chairman's tardy arrival. So whatever Jean had meant to say to Betty in private necessarily went unsaid.

And then, after all her worriment, Jean was the best Shylock!

"Which is perfectly comical considering Bob's suspicions," Betty told the green lizard, the only confidant to whom she could trust the play committee's state-secrets.

All the committee had been astonished at Jean's success, and most of them were disappointed. Christy or Emily Davis would have been so much pleasanter to work with, or even Kitty Lacy, whom Miss Kingston considered very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her early in her freshman year.

"And because she's Kitty, it isn't safe to give her another chance,"

said Miss Kingston regretfully, when the fifteen aspiring Shylocks had played their parts and the committee were comparing opinions. "Yes, I agree with Barbara that Jean Eastman is by far the most promising candidate, but----"

"But you don't think she's very good, now do you, Miss Kingston?" asked Clara Ellis, a rather lugubrious individual, who had been put on the committee because she was a "prod" in "English lit.," and not because she had the least bit of executive ability.

Miss Kingston hesitated. "Why no, Clara, I don't. I'm afraid she won't work up well; she doesn't seem to take criticism very kindly. But it's too soon to judge of that. At present she certainly has a much better conception of the part than any of the others."

"You don't think we've been too ambitious, do you, Miss Kingston?" asked Barbara, anxiously. Barbara knew Jean well and the prospect of managing the play with her capricious, selfish temperament to be catered to at every turn was not a pleasant one.

"I've thought so all along," put in Clara Ellis, decidedly, before Miss Kingston had had a chance to answer. "I think we ought to have made sure of a good Shylock before we voted to give this play. It will be perfectly awful to make a fizzle of it, and everything depends on getting a good Shylock, doesn't it, Miss Kingston?"

"A great deal certainly depends on that," agreed Miss Kingston. "But it's much too early to decide that you can't get a good Shylock."

"Why, who else is there?" demanded Clara, dismally. "Surely every possible and impossible person has tried to-day."

n.o.body seemed ready to answer this argument, and Betty, glancing at the doleful faces of her fellow-workers felt very much depressed until a new idea struck her.

"Miss Kingston," she said, "there have been fifteen senior plays at Harding, haven't there? And hasn't each one been better than any of those that came before it?"

"So each cla.s.s and its friends have thought," admitted Miss Kingston, smiling at Betty's eagerness, "and in the main I think they have been right."