It was Saturday afternoon and time for the “Merry Hearts’” meeting, which had been postponed for a day to let every one recover from Thursday evening’s excitement.

“Come along, Betty,” said Roberta Lewis, poking her head in at Betty’s half-open door. “We’re going to meet out on the back campus, by Nita’s hammock.”

“Could you wait just a second?” asked Betty absently, looking up from a much crossed and blotted sheet of paper. “If I can only think of a good way to end this sentence, I can inform Madeline Ayres that my ‘Novelists’’ paper is done. She said I couldn’t possibly finish it by five. See my new motto.”

“‘Do not let study interfere with your regular college career,’” read Roberta slowly. “What a lovely sentiment! Where did you get it?”

“Helen gave it to me for a commencement present,” said Betty, drawing a very black line through the words she had written last. “Isn’t it just like her?”

“Do you mean that it’s like her to give you something for commencement that you won’t have much use for afterward?”

“Yes,” laughed Betty, “and to give it to me because she says I made her see that it’s the sensible way of looking at college, although she thinks the person who got up these mottoes probably meant it for a joke. She wishes she could find out for sure about that. Isn’t she comical?”

“Yes,” said Roberta, “she is. You haven’t written as much as you’ve crossed out since I came, Betty Wales. We shall be late.”

Betty shut her fountain pen with a snap, and tossed the much blotted page on top of a heap of its fellows, which were piled haphazard in a chair beside her desk.

“Who cares for Madeline Ayres?” she said, and arm in arm the two friends started for the back campus, where they found all the rest of the senior “Merry Hearts” waiting for them. Dora Carlson couldn’t come, Eleanor explained; and Anne Carter and Georgia thought that they were too new to membership in the society to have any voice in deciding how it should be perpetuated.

“It’s rather nice being just by ourselves, isn’t it?” said Bob.

“It’s rather nice being all together,” added Babbie in such a significant tone that Babe gave her a withering glance and summarily called the meeting to order.

The discussion that followed was animated, but it didn’t seem to arrive anywhere. There were Lucile and Polly and their friends in the sophomore class who would be proud to receive a legacy from the seniors they admired so much; and there was a junior crowd, who, as K. put it, were a “jolly good sort,” and would understand the “Merry Hearts’” policy and try to keep up its influence in the college. Everybody agreed that, if the society went down at all, it ought to descend to a set of girls who were prominent enough to give a certain prestige to its democratic principles, and who, being intimate friends, would enjoy working and playing together as the first generation of “Merry Hearts” had, and would know how to bring in the “odd ones” like Dora and Anne, when opportunity offered.

“But after all,” said Rachel dejectedly, “it would never be quite the same. We are ‘Merry Hearts’ because we wanted to be. The idea just fitted us.”

“And will look like a rented dress suit on any one else,” added Madeline frivolously. “Of course I’m not a charter member of 19—, and perhaps I ought not to speak. But don’t you think that the younger classes will find their own best ways of keeping up the right spirit at Harding? I vote that the ‘Merry Hearts’ has done its work and had its little fling, and that it would better go out when we do.”

“Then it ought to go out in a regular blaze of glory,” said Bob, when murmurs of approval had greeted Madeline’s opinion.

“I know a way.” Betty spoke out almost before she thought, and then she blushed vividly, fearing that she had been too hasty and that the “Merry Hearts” might not approve of her plan.

“Is it one of the things you thought of while you were being run away with?” asked Madeline quizzically.

Betty laughed and nodded. “You’d better make a list of the things I thought of, Miss Ayres, if the subject interests you so much.”

“Was there one for every scratch on your face?” asked Katherine.

Betty drew herself up with a comical affectation of offended dignity. “I almost wish I’d broken my collar-bone, as Bob thought I ought to. Then perhaps I should get a little sympathy.”

“And where would the costumes for the play have been, with you laid up in the infirmary for a month?” demanded Babbie with a groan.

“Do you know that’s the very thing I worried about most when Lady was running,” began Betty, so earnestly that everybody laughed again.

“Just the same it wouldn’t have been any joke, would it, about those costumes,” said Bob, when the mirth had subsided, “nor about all the other committee work that you’ve done and that nobody else knows much about.”

“Not even to mention that we should hate to have anything happen to you for purely personal reasons,” said Madeline, shivering in the warm sunshine as she remembered how that dreadful pile of white stones had glistened in the moonlight.

“I think this class would better pass a law: No more riding by prominent seniors,” declared Katherine Kittredge. “If Emily Davis should get spilled, there would go our good young Gobbo and our Ivy Day orator, besides nobody knows how much else.”

“Christy is toastmistress and Antonio.”

“Kate is chairman of the supper committee and Portia.”

“Everybody who’s anything is a lot of things, I guess,” said little Helen Adams. She herself was in the mob that made the background for the trial scene in “The Merchant of Venice,” and she was as elated over her part as any of the chief actors could possibly be over their leading rÔles. But that wasn’t all. She was trying for the Ivy song, which is chosen each year by competition. She had been working on her song in secret all through the year, and she felt sure that nobody had cared so much or tried so hard as she,—though of course, she reminded herself sternly it took more than that to write the winning song and she didn’t mean to be disappointed if she failed.

“Order please, young ladies,” commanded Babe, who delighted to exercise her presidential dignities. “We are straying far from the subject in hand—to adapt the words of our beloved Latin professor. Betty Wales was going to tell us how the ‘Merry Hearts’ could go out with a splurge.”

“I object to the president’s English,” interrupted Madeline. “The connotation of the term splurge is unpleasant. We don’t wish to splurge. Now go ahead, Betty.”

“Why, it’s nothing much,” said Betty modestly, “and probably it’s not at all what Bob is thinking of. It’s just that, as Helen says, everybody who is in anything is in a lot of things and most of the class are being left out of the commencement plans. I thought of it first that day we had a lecture on monopolies in sociology. Don’t you remember Miss Norris’s saying that there were classes and masses and excellent examples of monopolies right here in college, and that we needn’t wait until we were out to have a chance to fight trusts and equalize wages.”

“Oh, that was just an illustration,” objected Bob blandly. “Miss Norris didn’t mean anything by it.”

“She’s a Harding girl herself,” Betty went on, “and it’s certainly true, even if she didn’t intend it to be acted on. Thursday night when I went over the things I had to do about commencement and thought I couldn’t do any of them I felt dreadfully greedy.”

“But Betty,” Rachel took her up, “don’t you think it takes executive ability to be on committees and plan things? Commencement would be at sixes and sevens if the wrong girls had charge of it.”

“Yes, of course it would,” agreed Betty. “Only I wondered if all the left-out people are the wrong kind.”

“Of course they’re not,” said Madeline Ayres with decision. “What is executive ability, anyway?”

“The thing that Christy Mason has,” returned Bob promptly.

“Exactly,” said Madeline, “and that is just practice in being at the head of things,—nothing more. Christy isn’t much of a pusher, she isn’t particularly brilliant or particularly tactful; but she’s been on committees as regularly as clockwork all through her course, and she’s learned when to pull and when to push, and when to sit back and make the rest push. It’s a thing any one can learn, like French or bookkeeping or how to make sugar-cookies. I hate it myself, but I don’t believe it’s a difficult accomplishment.”

“Perhaps not,” protested Bob, “but it takes time, if it’s anything like French or cookies—I never tried the bookkeeping. We don’t want to make any experiments with our one and only commencement.”

“Why, I’m an experiment,” said Roberta hastily, as if she had just thought of it and felt impelled to speak.

“Yes, but you’re the exception that proves the rule,” said Nita Reese brusquely. Nita’s reputation for executive ability was second only to Christy’s and she was badly overworked, and tired and cross in consequence. “I don’t think I quite get your idea, Betty. Do you want K., for instance, to give up her part in the play to Leslie Penrose, who was told she could have it at first and cried for a whole day when she found there had been a mistake?”

“Come, Nita,” said Madeline lazily, but with a dangerous flash in her gray eyes. “That’s not the way to take our last chance to make more ‘Merry Hearts.’ Let Betty tell us exactly what she does mean.”

“Please do, Betty,” begged Nita, half ashamed already of her ill-tempered outburst.

“Of course I don’t want K. to give up her part,” began Betty with a grateful look at Madeline and a smile for Katherine. “I only thought that some of us are in so many things that we’re tired and rushed all the time, and not enjoying our last term half as much as we might.”

“My case exactly,” put in Nita repentantly.

“Whereas there are girls in the class who’ve never had anything to do here but study, and who would be perfectly delighted to be on some little unimportant commencement committee.”

“But they ought to realize,” said Babbie loftily, “that in a big college like Harding very few people can have a chance to be at the head of things. Our commencement is pretty enough to pay our families for coming even if the girls they are particularly interested in don’t have parts. Being on a committee isn’t a part anyway.”

“Girls who are never on them think it is,” said Helen Adams.

There was an ominous silence.

At the end of it Babbie slipped out of the hammock and sat down beside Betty on the grass. “It’s no use at all fighting you, Betty Wales,” she declared amiably. “You always twist the things we don’t want to do around until they seem simple and easy and no more than decent. Of course it’s true that we are all tired to death doing things that the left-outs will be blissful at the prospect of helping us with. But it’s been so every year and no other class ever turned its play and its commencement upside down. And yet you make it seem the only reasonable thing to do.”

“Lucky our class-meeting happened to be postponed,” said Bob in matter-of-fact tones, “Makes it easier arranging things.”

“A coÖperative commencement will send us out with a splurge all right,” remarked Babe.

Thus the B’s made a graceful concession to the policy of trying more experiments with 19—’s commencement.

“One man, one office—that’s our slogan,” declared Katherine, when Babe had announced that the vote in favor of Betty’s plan was unanimous. “No hard and fast policy, but the general encouragement of passing around the honors. I haven’t but one myself, so I shall have to look on and see that the rest of you do your duty.”

“Let’s make a list of the vacancies that will probably occur in our midst, as it were,” suggested Rachel.

“I wonder if we couldn’t lengthen the Ivy Day program and make room for a few more girls in that way,” put in Eleanor. “The oration and the song don’t take any time at all.”

“Fine idea!” cried Madeline. “We have a lot of musical and literary talent in the class that isn’t being used anywhere. We’ll turn it over to the Ivy Day committee with instructions to build their program accordingly.”

“But we must manage things tactfully,” interposed Babbie, “as we did about the junior usher dresses. We mustn’t let the left-overs suspect that we are making places for them.”

“By the way,” said Madeline, “have you heard that this year’s junior ushers are going to keep up the precedent, out of compliment to us?”

“Pretty cute,” cried Babe. “I hope they’ll manage to look as well as we did.”

“And as we are going to again this year in our sweet simplicity costumes,” said Babbie, with a little sigh of regret for the wonderful imported gown that her mother had suggested buying as part of her commencement present.

It was growing late, so the “Merry Hearts” made a hasty outline of procedure, and delegated Rachel to see Marie Howard and ask her to help with the plan as far as she could at the approaching class-meeting. Luckily this was not until the following Tuesday, so there was plenty of time to interview all the right people and get the coÖperative campaign well established before Marie rose at the meeting to read what would otherwise have seemed an amazing list of committee appointments. Emily Davis gave up Gobbo at once and Christy, after weighing the relative glories of being toastmistress and Antonio decided that she could help more at the class supper. Both girls declared that they were delighted to be relieved of part of their responsibilities.

“Those toasts that I hadn’t time to brown properly were getting on my nerves,” Christy declared.

“And my Ivy oration was growing positively frivolous, it was so mixed up with young Gobbo’s irresponsible way of changing masters,” confessed Emily. “I’ve wanted to drop out of the play, but I was afraid the girls would think me as irresponsible as Gobbo. Leslie Penrose knows my part and she can step into the place as well as not.”

It was a surprise to everybody when Kate Denise joined the movement, without even having been asked to do so. She gave up everything but her part as Portia, and used her influence to make the rest of the Hill girls do the same.

“I guess she remembers how we did them up last year on the dress business,” chuckled Bob.

“She’s a lot nicer than the rest of her crowd,” Babbie reminded her, “and I think she’s tired of acting as if she wasn’t.”

“I hate freaks,” said Babe, “but it is fun to see them bustle around, acting as if they owned the earth. Leslie’s whole family is coming to commencement, down to the youngest baby, and the fat Miss Austin is fairly bursting with pride just because she’s on the supper committee. She has some good ideas, too.”

“Of course they’re proud,” said little Helen Adams sententiously. “Things you’ve never had always look valuable to you.”

Helen had won in the song contest. Her family would see her name and her song in print on the Ivy Day program, and May Hayward, a friend of hers and T. Reed’s in their desolate freshman year, was to be in the mob in Helen’s place.

All the changes had been made without any difficulty and no one was worrying lest experiments should prove the ruin of 19—’s commencement. Mr. Masters had protested hotly against Christy’s withdrawal from the play, but the new Antonio was proving herself a great success and even Mr. Masters had to admit that the whole play had gained decidedly the minute that the actors had dropped their other outside interests. But the great difference was in the spirit of good-fellowship that prevailed everywhere. Everybody had something to do now, or if not, then her best friend had, and they talked it over together, told what Christy had suggested about the tables for class-supper, how Kate was having all her own dresses made for Portia and Nerissa couldn’t afford to, so Eleanor Watson had lent her a beautiful blue satin, or what the new Ivy Day committees had decided about the exercises. There was no longer a monopoly of anything in 19—. Incidentally, as Katherine pointed out, nobody was resting her nerves at the infirmary.

Betty would have been perfectly happy if she hadn’t felt obliged to worry a little about Georgia Ames. Ashley Dwight had been up to see her twice since the prom. Betty felt responsible for their friendship and wondered if she ought to warn Tom that she really didn’t know anything about Georgia. For suppose Georgia hadn’t had anything to do with the Westcott house robbery; that didn’t prove anything about her having taken Nita’s pin in the fall.

If Madeline had spoken to her protÉgÉe, as she intended to do, about excluding the Blunderbuss from her acquaintance, Georgia had paid the advice scant heed. The Blunderbuss came to see her more and more often as the term went on. To be sure Georgia was very seldom at home when the senior called. Indeed her roommate was getting to feel decidedly injured because Georgia never used her room except to sleep and dress in.