WHEN Jacquette came down to breakfast the next morning, looking pale in spite of her fresh pink and white gown, her grandfather stood at the foot of the stairs waiting, and, as she paused on the last step, he put both hands on her shoulders, and kissed her.

Not a word was said about the missing Sigma Pi pin, but Jacquette, glancing past him, saw the tremulous smile on Aunt Sula’s face, and knew that both these dearest people on earth understood how hard it had been for her to make the decision of the night before, and were keeping back the expression of their own gladness, for her sake. It touched her deeply to realise how much the gentle old man had really cared, during all the months when he had kept so silent, and the answering hug she gave him spoke her feeling as plainly as words.

After that they went to the table and chatted about the graduating exercises, Bobs’s prophecy, and Louise’s honours as lightly as if no such thing as resignation from a sorority had ever been thought of, until, just as they were rising from breakfast, Aunt Sula happened to say,

“Of course Uncle Malcolm and Aunt Fanny were disappointed that Quis didn’t take the scholarship, but it must have been easier for them to see Louise carry it off than anyone else. She’s such a pet with them, they couldn’t help being glad.”

Then Jacquette’s grandfather, slipping one arm around his little, dark-haired daughter, and the other around the tall girl he called “Goldilocks,” said slowly,

“I suppose the Markhams think they’re the proudest, happiest family in town this morning—but they’re not.”

He was looking into Jacquette’s eyes as he spoke, and, in spite of a choking sensation in her throat, she smiled back at him bravely while she squeezed Aunt Sula’s hand. It was a comfort to feel that they all understood without words.

Before the morning was over, Jacquette slipped away for a talk with Louise, and when she came back, she went straight to Aunt Sula’s room.

“Tia,” she said, “don’t think I’m weakening, but Louise advises me not to take off my pin yet and not to say a word to any of the girls until they all come together again at the beginning of the fall term. There won’t be any sorority doings in vacation, anyway, and some of the girls have gone away for the summer already, and several more start to-day, and she says if I should tell the few that are left, they would begin to write letters to the others giving their versions of the matter, and my reasons wouldn’t be half as well understood as if I went to the first sorority meeting of the year myself, and explained it to them all at the same time.”

“That sounds sensible; perhaps she’s right,” Aunt Sula agreed. “How does she feel about what you’re going to do?”

“Oh, she’s the same trump as ever. At first she felt that I couldn’t do it—that I wouldn’t be able to stand the way the girls would act, but after that, she praised me until I felt foolish. But still——” Jacquette stopped as if sorry she had begun the sentence.

“Well?”

“She says, Tia, that if she were going to be here in high school another year, she’s afraid she couldn’t follow my lead. It would be more than she could bear to have all the Sigma Pi girls turn against her.”

There was a silence before Aunt Sula answered, “Never think, dear, that I don’t appreciate how hard it is.”

“And don’t you ever think I’m going back on it,” Jacquette cried, brushing away a few tears that had come in spite of her. “Will you explain to Grandpa why I put this on again? I—I’d rather not have to speak about it.” She walked to the mantel where the Sigma Pi pin had lain all night. “Tell him I’m just going to wear it until school begins. Louise says it would start questioning if I happened to meet any of the girls without having it on, and she thinks it will be so much better to tell them all together, myself.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him,” Aunt Sula promised, watching Jacquette’s tender glance at the little pin. “Does it really mean so much more to you than any other piece of jewellery?”

“Oh, it does! It stands for so many things—all my Marston good times—all my friendships with the girls. Why, anybody else but you would think it was perfectly foolish if I should tell how it makes me feel to think of leaving off that pin. But there!—we’re not going to talk about it all summer. Where’s that dimity you said I could make into a waist? If I’m going to be an accomplished dressmaker before vacation’s over, I mustn’t lose any time.”

So she plunged into the summer, determined not to make her sacrifice unlovely, and she succeeded, through all the busy weeks that followed. In July there was a visit to Brookdale, and after that, by her sweetest wiles, she coaxed her stay-at-home grandfather into a bracing trip on the lakes with Aunt Sula and herself, and brought him home feeling years younger and happier.

Then came a series of farewell boat-rides and picnics in the park, with Louise and Marquis and Bobs, for the two boys had honestly buried the high-school hatchet on the night of their graduation, and they and Louise were bent on making the most of these last days with Jacquette before starting away for their first year of college work. There was no end to the frolics they planned and carried out, until suddenly, in the midst of all the hurry and fun, came the opening day of school at Marston High.

Except Louise, Marquis and Bobs were the only ones outside of home who had been told Jacquette’s intention in regard to her sorority. Bobs had received the news very quietly. “It’ll take sand,” was his one comment, “and you have it.”

But telling Marquis had been another matter.

“It’s a quixotic attitude, imported from Brookdale, and you’ll find it doesn’t belong in Channing,” he had declared. “Aunt Sula and grandfather mean all right, I know, but their ideas are old-fashioned about some things and nobody will get your point of view, at all. Everybody at Marston will set you down as funny. I’m going to have mother go over and talk to Aunt Sula.”

The next day Aunt Fanny had come, and had said a great deal in her own forceful way about the pity of making Jacquette a social outcast for the remaining three years of her high-school life, especially after Marquis had interested himself so much to get her nicely started with the right girls. It was only the course of nature, she maintained, that, in a public school where all classes were thrown together, the carefully brought-up girls should band together, and be separated from the rabble.

Sula Granville’s answer had been that, though she was glad of Jacquette’s decision, she had never urged it, and, true to the spirit of this, she told her every word that Aunt Fanny had said. Apparently, there was no result, but the warnings found a sensitive spot, none the less, and they were all surging through Jacquette’s mind when she stood up at the first sorority meeting of the year, and faced her Sigma Pi sisters.

It was a sparse little gathering, compared with the last one of the spring before. Some of the girls had moved during the summer; others had been graduated; still others had broken off their course at Marston to go away to a finishing school. The Sigma Pi ranks would soon be filled by new girls—in fact there were five or six being rushed, even now—but, to-day, there were less than a dozen at the meeting.

For a minute Jacquette’s words refused to come. She remembered Bobs’s faith: “It’ll take sand—and you have it.” At the same instant, she met the loving eyes of Louise, sitting there in all the dignity of an alumna, among the other girls. She knew very well why Louise had taken time, in the hurry of preparation for her year away from home, to come to that meeting, and the knowledge helped. Then she thought of Tia, and began.

It was a simple, straightforward story, told with evident effort, and listened to in breathless silence by the girls. As Jacquette went on, a blank dismay grew on all the faces, but to her relief there was not a trace of the unfriendly resentment and bitterness that she had dreaded. It dawned upon her, while she stood there speaking, that a very different feeling had grown up between herself and the girls since the quarrel of almost a year before, and the thought added a new hurt to the step she was taking, but it did not make her falter.

She told them frankly how the first half of her freshman year had been so filled to overflowing with sorority business and sorority fun that her studies had been a farce; how she had often been actually crowded into the necessity of preparing one lesson during the recitation of another. She reminded them of her failure to pass for the month in two studies, just before the semi-finals, and of her determination, after that, to show everybody that she could be a sorority girl and a student, too, an undertaking which had proved too much for her physical strength.

“But it isn’t only on account of scholarship and health that I’m saying this,” she finished, honestly. “The truth is, girls, while I love you all as much as ever, I can’t help knowing that I do owe something to my home and the people in it. Last year, it was just a place to rush into for eating and sleeping. My interests were all somewhere else. Another thing: I haven’t a rich father, the way most of you have. I haven’t any father living. There is a certain sum of money set aside for my education, but it isn’t large, and the proportion of it that went into my first year at Marston was so much more than it had any right to be that the one reason of expense is enough to make me feel that I ought to give up being a Sigma Pi.”

Jacquette felt her knees begin to shake as she reached this period, and she sat down rather abruptly. For a minute no one made a sound.

Then Mamie Coolie, leaning forward, asked in a horrified tone,

“Jacquette, you can’t mean you’re going to make us expel you?”

Jacquette’s face quivered, but she managed to answer steadily, “I suppose it’s the only way.”

“Oh!” “How dreadful!” “But we can’t expel Jacquette.” “Tell her she’s wild to think of it.” “Talk her out of it, Louise,” were the whispers that flew round the room. Flo Burton sprang to her feet to protest, but she sat down again, sobbing, and then handkerchief after handkerchief went up as the girls saw that there were tears in Jacquette’s own eyes. Etta Brainerd, who was presiding, still sat in dumb amazement, trying to grasp the full significance of the thing, when Louise Markham’s voice caught the attention of everybody.

“I just want to remind you, girls,” she was saying, quietly, “that inactive membership excuses a member from all duties connected with the sorority. She isn’t required to help in the rushing, to go to spreads or initiations, in fact to do anything. She doesn’t have to pay dues. She simply wears her pin and is just as much one of us as ever in her spirit toward us and ours toward her. She’s allowed to know sorority secrets and she gets bids to the dances and all that, just like an alumna, and the best of it all is that no one outside of the sorority has to be any the wiser. There’s not a thing about inactive membership that could possibly interfere with one’s scholarship, or one’s health, or one’s pocket-book, and if the time comes when circumstances permit the inactive member to become active again, all she has to do is to say so. Of course I don’t want to dictate, when I’m not going to be here myself, but I just offer these remarks as a suggestion.”

“That’s the thing!” Flo Burton exclaimed, as Louise took her seat.

“That’s what we’ll do!” “Make her inactive for a year.” “You needn’t do a bit of work, Jacquette, but we can’t spare you and we just couldn’t disgrace you before the whole school. We love you too much.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you spoke of that, Louise!” cried all the girls together, throwing the order of the meeting to the winds as they crowded about the chair where Jacquette sat, her face flooded with sudden gladness.

Louise had not given her an inkling of what she meant to do, and Jacquette had never thought of hoping that the girls might cling to her, regardless of her active usefulness to the sorority. The whole spirit of the meeting was so different from the thing which she had braced herself to endure that it swept her along, unresisting, and it began to seem as if she had created, in her own imagination, a bogy which never existed. What harm could there be in simply keeping the friendship of the girls?

“Oh, Louise,” she whispered, eagerly, catching the hand of her closest friend, “do you think it’s all right? Would Tia be just as well pleased?”

“Don’t see why not,” was the sturdy answer. “It gives you back all your time for study and home things, and just prevents your losing the friendship of the girls you like best. I think she’ll be glad, or I shouldn’t have proposed it.”

So it was settled, and when Jacquette, still wearing her pin, walked home with a body-guard of devoted Sigma Pi girls following to the door, it seemed as if a great cloud had rolled out of her sky. Inactive membership would have seemed impossible before the moment when she had made up her mind to endure actual expulsion, but now, with its promise of comparative secrecy, its assurance of continued friendship from the girls, and its possibility of a return to activity sometime in the future, it glittered like a beautiful reward of virtue.

She was so sure of having done the right thing, that it was hard to be patient and explain, when Aunt Sula and her grandfather seemed doubtful, but she succeeded, and, when she finally went upstairs alone, she smiled at a happy Jacquette in the mirror, resolving that Tia should see, from day to day, how truly inactive membership would give all the benefits and none of the drawbacks of the uncompromising other plan.

Jacquette was early at school the next morning, and Mademoiselle gave her an approving nod. Then she asked her to help two new pupils in making out their programme.

It happened that they were both girls who had been singled out the day before as possible members of Sigma Pi, and, though Jacquette fully intended to keep out of the rushing, she was glad of an innocent chance to lend a hand, and proceeded to make herself as attractive as possible. While doing so, she took such a fancy to the younger of the two, a shy little brown-eyed girl named Mary Elliott, that at noon she found herself watching for them to come out of their class so that she might take them under her wing and show them the best kind of sandwich to buy at the “eat-house.”

As the three went out of the school building together, they met a group of Jacquette’s Sigma Pi sisters, with two more new girls, and all fell in together. “Isn’t that a Sigma Pi Epsilon pin you have on?” Mary Elliott asked of Jacquette, who nodded with an odd little ripple of gladness over her face.

“Marion, that settles it for me?” said Mary to the other girl.

“Settles what?” Jacquette inquired.

“Oh, nothing; only two sororities have asked us to their spreads this afternoon, and I want to go to the Sigma Pi Epsilon one, if that’s what you belong to.”

“Well, I should say! So do I,” Marion Crandall chimed in promptly, with a bold, black-eyed glance at Jacquette, which, though it was meant to be flattering, did not altogether please her.

“Do all the girls that go to this school belong to sororities?” Mary Elliott asked Jacquette in a timid undertone.

“Mercy, no!”

The innocent question brought a smile to Jacquette’s face.

“All the nicest ones, then?” “Well, a nice girl that didn’t make a sorority would have a pretty lonesome time at Marston,” Jacquette was admitting, when Blanche Gross suddenly whirled around and offered them hot roasted peanuts from the bag she carried.

“Jack, do you know about these four Marys?” she asked, laughingly. “You have two with you, and I have two more here. Let me make you acquainted with Mary Barnes from St. Paul and Marie Stanwood from Omaha.”

“And here’s Marion Crandall and Mary Elliott,” Jacquette responded. “Isn’t that the funniest thing? They must be the ‘Queen’s Maries’.”

“Oh, do you know that song?” said Mary Elliott. “My mother used to sing me to sleep with it.”

“Pretty sad going to sleep, wasn’t it?” Jacquette asked, with a smile, and hummed a little of the haunting old melody:

“You left out,

And oh, girls!—we are Mary B, and Mary S. and Mary C. and me. I must be ‘me’—M. E.—Mary Elliott.”

“Sure enough!” Jacquette answered, gaily. “Now, all you girls have to do is to fly around and catch your Queen.”

But, while the rest laughed, Mary Elliott surprised her by nestling closer as they passed into the restaurant, and whispering, with an adoring upward glance, “I’ve caught my Queen, now.” This was how it happened that Jacquette began to be called the “Queen”—a nickname that clung to her from that day; and, in spite of the fact that she was never seen at spreads, and that she was even absent from the triumphant initiation, a few weeks later, when the “four Maries” were all taken into Sigma Pi at once, the new girls understood that she was identified with the sorority they were joining, and, for some reason—perhaps in the start a fanciful idea of being the “Queen’s Maries”—they insisted on choosing her as their sorority “mother.”

It was she who furnished them with the thousand and one little hints on high-school dress and manners which were part of the Sigma Pi education of new members, and, in return, all the Maries, with the exception perhaps of Marion Crandall, whose effusive manner never seemed quite real to Jacquette, gave their Queen the confidence of devoted subjects. But, of the four, it was Mary Elliott who came closest. After a little, she fell into the habit of bringing her books, day after day, and studying at the “Palace,” as the Queen’s modest home was immediately dubbed, and both Mr. Granville and his daughter found themselves growing very fond of the gentle girl, at first because of the love in her eyes whenever she looked at Jacquette, but soon because of her own dear, quiet little self.