What "Bean" intended to do in the matter of her recent hazing was a question which worried the Sans considerably during the next few days. The very fact that they had escaped, thus far, without even having been quizzed by any of the students regarding that fateful evening puzzled them. True, they suspected Marjorie's four chums and Leila and Vera as having been among those who broke up the hazing party. They cherished an erroneous belief, however, that there were at least fifteen or twenty of the invaders.

It was gall and wormwood to those of the Sans who attended the dance in its closing hour to see Marjorie, radiantly pretty, enjoying herself as though she had never been through a trying experience only three hours before. By common consent the rescue party, as well as Marjorie, paid no more attention to the Sans than if they had not been present. The dance had been such an unusually pleasant affair! More than one girl remarked early in the evening to her closest friends that things went along so much better when a certain clique of girls were absent. The Sans' junior classmates were not pleased at their late attendance of the masquerade. They criticized the Sans as selfish and lacking in proper class spirit. Thus the Sans fashioned a new rod that night for their backs of which they were destined later to feel the sting.

The day following the masquerade the sophomore team sent the junior team an acceptance of their challenge. This mystified the Sans five even more. Under the circumstances they had expected and even hoped their challenge would be declined. A refusal on the part of the sophomore team to play them would give them an opportunity to intimate that their opponents were afraid to meet them for fear of being beaten. Deep in their hearts the Sans five were the real cowards. They dreaded playing against Marjorie and Muriel in particular. As Leslie gloomily said to Natalie, "Bean and that Harding snip will certainly get back at you if they can. I imagine Robina Page was one of that crowd who gave us the run."

Leslie had been terribly out of sorts since the failure of her plot. She did not know where she stood at Hamilton as regarded safety. She was highly disgruntled by the lack of cordiality shown her and her chums by many students whom she had considered friendly to her. It was being forced upon her, little by little, that the Sans were losing ground. They had sworn to win back their lost power of the previous year. They had not done this. Now the game with the sophomores must be played and she was not in the mood to coach her team, nor were they in the mood to play. She doubted if they would dare make use of "the soft talk." The freshman team had expressed themselves quite openly on that subject about the campus. When taxed with it once or twice by juniors who had learned of it and deferred judgment, Leslie had replied with sarcastic bravado that the freshies had evidently "heard things" during the game which no one else heard.

The game being scheduled for the twenty-seventh of February, Leslie allowed her bruised and shaken team three days' rest. After that time she fairly drove them to private practice. She pestered Ramsey, the coach, for new and sure methods of winning points from an antagonist until he resolved within himself to "beat it" for New York on the day of the game and leave no address. He had received a lump sum in advance for his coaching, so he had no scruples about deserting the ship.

Her five satellites complained bitterly at having to practice every day. All of them had received warnings in one subject or another and needed their time for study. Leslie was adamant. "Just this one game," she said over and over again. "After that we will settle down to work. I am not doing as well as I ought in my subjects. But you must play the sophs and beat them if you can. Don't try any of those new stunts Ramsey showed you unless you can put them over so cleverly no one will know the difference. You will have to be careful. You have a touchy proposition to tackle."

Alarmed at the gradual decrease in their own popularity, the Sans five practiced assiduously during the week preceding the game. They hoped to make a good showing on their own merits. The coach glibly assured them that they were doing wonderful work with the ball. Toward the last of their practice they began to believe it themselves.

They continued to believe thus until after the first five minutes of the game on the following Saturday. With the gymnasium filled by a clamorous aggregation of students, the toss-up was made and the game begun. The sophomore five took the lead from the first and put the Sans five through a pace that made them fairly gasp. All thought of cheating abandoned, they fought desperately to score. They were not allowed to make a single point. Behind the resolution of the sophs to win they demonstrated a peculiarly personal antagonistic force which their opponents felt, dimly at first, keenly afterward. It was the fastest game that had been played for many a year at Hamilton and it ended in a complete whitewash for the juniors. They retired from the floor too utterly vanquished to do other than indulge in a dismal cry in concert once the door of their dressing room had closed upon them.

Thus Leslie found them. Signally discouraged, she experienced a momentary desire to cry with them. She fought it down, gruffly advising her chums not to cry their eyes out in case they might need them later.

"Don't be so simple," was her barren consolation. "You don't see me bathed in salt weeps, do you? No, sir. Forget basket ball. I swear I'll never have anything more to do with it. I'll send that Ramsey packing tomorrow. From now on, I'm going to keep up in my classes and after classes enjoy myself. If we can't run the college now, that's no sign we never will. We can be exclusive. There are enough of us to do that. I don't believe Bean and her crowd are going to tell any tales on us. For the rest of the year we'll just amuse ourselves in our own way."

"It's almost a year since we started to rag Miss Dean and had so much trouble over that affair," half-sobbed Dulcie Vale. "You are always making plans to get even with someone you don't like, Leslie Cairns, and dragging us into them. You never win. You always get the worst of it. I don't intend to go into any more such schemes with you. My father said if ever I was expelled from college he would make me take a position in his office. Think of that!" Dulcie's voice rose to a scream.

"He did? Well, don't tell everybody in the gym about it," Leslie advised, then laughed. Her laughter was echoed in quavering fashion by the other weepers. Under their false and petty ideas of life there was still so much of the eagerness of girlhood to be liked, to succeed and to be happy. Only they were obstinately traveling the wrong road in search of it.

Out in the gymnasium the winning team were being carried about the great room on the shoulders of admiring and noisy fans. Marjorie smiled to herself as she reflected that this was a pleasant ending of her basket-ball days. She had firmly determined not to play during the next year. Standing among her teammates afterward, surrounded by a circle of enthusiastic fans, it was borne upon her that she knew a great many Hamilton girls. She had not thought her friendly acquaintances among them so large.

"You did what Muriel said you folks would do," Jerry exulted, when, congratulations over, Muriel and Marjorie were free to join their chums. "You laid the junies up for the winter. That team must have been crazy to challenge you. They played well, for them. Against your five—good night! A whitewash! Think of it!"

"They deserved it." Marjorie's eyes lost their smiling light. The curves of her red lips straightened a trifle. "We paid them for ragging the freshies. They have had two hard defeats inside of two weeks. They ought to retire on them. They are lucky in that we haven't made trouble for them. Between you and me, Jeremiah, the Sans are not gaining an inch at Hamilton. The juniors are peeved with them for not taking proper interest in the Valentine dance. Many of the seniors disapprove of them, particularly since the game they won dishonestly from the freshies. Only a handful of the sophs cling to them. The freshies—I don't know. They are still about half Sans-bound. Just the same, democracy at Hamilton isn't on the wane. It's on the gain."