A terrible sound wakened Cathalina and she sprang out of bed. “Brr-rr-rr-ting-a-ling-a-ting-ting-ting!” She found herself shaking behind her bed and realized that the alarm clock, not far from Hilary’s head, was the source of the racket.

“For pity’s sake!—Hilary!” cried Cathalina.

Hilary turned and threw her arms out over the spread.

“Hilary! Wake up! I don’t know how to stop the old thing!”

One eye opened. Hilary slowly sat up and looked in dazed fashion at Cathalina who was back in bed, laughing with her fingers in her ears. “Please stop it, Hilary.”

“It’s the intermittent kind,” said Hilary sleepily, and as if to prove her words the noise stopped for a moment, only to resume operations with renewed vigor. Hilary reached for the clock and turned off the alarm.

“And you never even wakened!”

A little later, two new fountain pens were busily scratching away at the first letters home. This was Hilary’s:

Cathalina’s letter ran thus:

When Cathalina’s letter was received it was eagerly opened. With what relief did Mr. and Mrs. Van Buskirk catch the new note in Cathalina’s message. Sylvia, to whom the house had been a lonely place without her little girl, finally dissolved into tears and sobbed a little on Philip’s shoulder; while he, who hated tears as men do, nevertheless comforted her and let her have it out.

The busy pastor of Glenwood, with his wife, quite as eagerly read the brief letter from their daughter, the first of their flock to leave home for any length of time. And at family prayers that night a strong petition went up for the “dear child among strangers and the sweet girl with her” ... “Keep them, O Lord, and give Thy angels charge over them, and may Thy truth be their shield and buckler!”

Meanwhile, the two girls, in their neat school dresses, made ready for their first class. Hilary, capable and serious, took notebook and pencil. Cathalina, who hardly knew how to prepare, followed her example. “I’m a great hand,” said Hilary, “to jot everything down and then I know just what to do.” They had consulted the schedule of hours and rooms the night before and had made out their lists with the name of each teacher.

“Number seventeen, Randolph,” mused Cathalina, “for Latin, and number fifteen for algebra. How shall I ever find out about everything. I envy the old girls. They needn’t waste so much time asking questions and wandering around.”

“O, we’ll be old girls next year,” said Hilary. “Let’s take the elevator down. It’s on the side next Randolph and near the covered way.”

Cathalina soon found herself, with about twenty other girls, entering a pleasant recitation room, at whose desk sat an intellectual looking woman of early middle age.

“My, she looks awful,” thought Cathalina, and glanced at her schedule again. “Prof. Emmeline Carver, M.A., Ph.D!”

In hushed silence the class sat waiting, most of them new, first year girls, scared and awed. To everybody’s relief, Dr. Carver spoke pleasantly, if a bit stiffly, gave the name of the text book and directed the class to the front hall where a supply of the books was on sale. With the assignment of a lesson and a few general remarks on the importance of their Latin course, she then dismissed them.

As the girls escaped, for that seemed to be the general feeling, one of them near Cathalina drew a long breath and said, “Doctor Carver. I don’t like her looks. I bet she carves us up, all rightee. They say what she doesn’t know about Latin and Greek and German isn’t worth knowing, but O my! Let me get my book and get to work!”

“Nonsense!” thought Cathalina. “I don’t believe she is so bad. She looks intelligent and interesting, as Mother would say. If she is too awful I’ll talk it over with Miss Randolph. She wont let me be actually slaughtered!” Cathalina almost giggled aloud at the application of Dr. Carver’s name. “‘Old Carver,’ Diane called her this morning, and I thought her so disrespectful and not at all refined. I wonder what Hilary will think of her in Cicero.”

At the algebra class Cathalina met Professor Goodman and liked him at once. He was a scholarly, kind-looking man, with a keen eye and a brisk manner. With his family he lived at Greycliff Heights.

“No real recitations today,” reported Cathalina to Hilary.

“Same here. Pretty nice place so far, isn’t it?”

Cathalina laughed. “Yes, but I feel the sword hanging over me.”

“Nonsense! Honestly you won’t mind it.”

With such speeches from Hilary, Cathalina kept up her courage until the hour arrived and she walked in to the class in beginning Latin, feeling much as the old martyrs must have felt when they were led to the stake. Both girls had put every spare minute on their lessons, bravely refusing all invitations to visit lake or campus, or to explore the many as yet unknown delights of Greycliff. Experienced Hilary had said, “There’s a good deal in the way you begin, whether it’s a game or a lesson.” So Cathalina puzzled over the rather uninteresting introductions of her text books. Latin promised well, since she had already studied other tongues than English, but she had a terrible time committing the rules of quantity. Algebra, as she told Hilary, looked like a Chinese puzzle.

“Thank fortune, the V’s are toward the end of the alphabet!” she thought, as she was assigned a seat in the back row. “I won’t have the rest of the class staring at me when I recite.”

“Miss Van Buskirk, you may explain what we mean by quantity in Latin and give the rules.” Miss Carver looked up from the roll from which she was calling upon the as yet unknown quantities of her class.

Cathalina was frightened, but rose mechanically, and to her own amazement, her mind cleared, she met calmly the fierce glare of Miss Carver’s spectacles and words began to come.

“Louder, please, this is not a drawing room conversation,” came the sarcastic tones as Dr. Carver’s lips curved into an unpleasant smile. Cathalina’s voice rose, and her repressed ire gave her just enough self-possession to sail through the rules without a break, after which she sat down, quivering but triumphant.

“You are not through, Miss Van Buskirk. That was a good exhibition of memory, but have you any idea of the meaning of the rules?”

Cathalina rose again. “I was hoping that you would explain,” she said meekly. “I understand a little.”

That was a better shot than Cathalina knew, for Dr. Carver was not particularly clear or helpful in explanation, but wonderfully pompous in making demands upon the class. By the time the class was dismissed its members were in various stages of nervous prostration, as one of the girls told it, but strange to say, Cathalina’s fear was gone.

When Hilary came into the suite before lunch, Cathalina was curled up on the bed working on algebra. “How did Cicero go?” she asked demurely.

“My! the dear doctor slaughtered ’em right and left. She’s a new variety, as the vegetable catalogues say. There’ll be great fun. I see you’re still alive.”

“Fun! I don’t like to be made angry. It keeps me from learning. I wish there were another class to somebody else! My other teachers are fine,—human!”

“Isn’t it funny that Miss Randolph has anybody like that? It’s hard enough to be a lady anyhow, without an example like that in the school room!”

“If the girls were disrespectful or anything there’d be some excuse. I never heard anybody talk like that.”

“Rap-rap-rap.”

“Come in,” called Hilary, running out to the sitting-room door. Half a dozen girls came in.

“Welcome, merry sunshine!” said Hilary with her best bow. “You look like a church committee. What does this mean?”

“Council of war,” answered Eloise, her eyes flashing. “Do you want to join?”

“Mercy!” said Cathalina appearing in the door. “What side are you on, Germany or the Allies?”

“No need to ask, under this flag,” and Eloise struck an attitude, pointing to Old Glory floating from the flag pole on the front of the campus. “But whatever we are we are on the war path! Little children are safe, however, so don’t worry.” (These were the days of the first shocks and surprises of the World War.)

“How are you getting along, Cathalina,” asked Lilian, who knew how Cathalina felt about going to recitation.

“Fine,” answered Cathalina. “After my first recitation, which I came through whole, in spite of Dr. Carver, I haven’t minded anything.”

“That is right to the point,” said Grace. “It has occurred to us that we might do something to improve her state of mind a little, as it were.”

“Humph!” Diane exclaimed. “I’m clear mad through and through! Just her air is enough, before she gets off any of that brilliant sarcasm! I declare war here and now!”

Hilary looked distressed. “I’m afraid it isn’t right, girls, to feel that way, though I will admit she’s the worst I ever saw. What is the matter? Has she been here long?”

“No indeed! This is her first year and I hope her last. You ought to have heard her in Virgil today. What did you think of the way she talked to me, Eloise?”

“I was mad for you; I just wanted to go right up and slap that woman!”

“Look out, Eloise, your eyes will light the gas!”

Eloise laughed but kept on. “Diane had a good lesson. All of us had been working our heads off. Any Latin is bad enough, but poetry! You couldn’t find a subject to some of the sentences, you know. Well, I guess Dr. Carver wanted to show off how much she knew instead of helping us, so she picked out something—I’ve forgotten what it was,—and made so much to do about it, and ridiculed Diane and told her it was a pity she hadn’t learned that in first year Latin, as if we can remember every old gender or form!”

“I know I’m going to like Latin,” said Cathalina, “but how I’m going to like her even a little bit is more than I can see. But I suppose you don’t absolutely have to like all your teachers, do you?”

“It makes it much nicer,” said Hilary, “and I suppose teachers do have a hard life!” The girls laughed at Hilary’s serious tone.

“Never mind, Hilary,—you’re a preacher’s daughter, so we won’t ask you to do anything. We aren’t going to do much ourselves, only stir her up a little and have some fun. Promise, now, girls, that you won’t tell, or be surprised at anything, or give anybody a hint?”

“Never!” promised both Hilary and Cathalina, smiling broadly.

“Then watch and wait for developments!” and the six girls filed out.

“What do you suppose they’ll do, Hilary?” Cathalina looked excited and interested.

“Haven’t the least idea. Maybe it will all fall through. Girls are like that sometimes.”

“Not these girls. They have been here, you know, and can think of things. Ann Maria is like that, into all the fun going on.”

“Who is Ann Maria,—cute name.”

“She is my cousin, about my brother’s age and has been to boarding school for several years, in the East. You ought to hear her and my brother tell about their schools! Well, we shall see—”

“What we shall see!” finished Hilary.