“Katherine Foster!”

“Peggy Parsons!”

Two suit-cases went banging down on the wooden platform and two radiant figures hurled themselves into each other’s arms, oblivious of the shriek of departing trains, the rattling of baggage trucks, and the jostling crowds who were at liberty to laugh at their impulsiveness.

For this was Springfield, where East meets West on its way to half a dozen New England colleges, and where every fall the same scenes of joyous greeting are enacted with the annual accompaniment of little squeals of delighted welcome and many glad kisses.

“Well, Peggy, you look just the same as ever!”

“It’s been a perfect century, Katherine! Going right up to Hampton? Taking the 9:10? So am I. Oh, so much to talk about——”

Breathlessly chattering all the while, the two girls in blue serge, who had been room-mates last year at preparatory school, gathered up their suit-cases again and crossed the tracks to the other side of the station to wait for the Hampton train. Engines steamed along before and behind them, but neither looked away from the other’s glowing face during the crossing, nor did they cease both to talk at once until they were actually seated in their train some time later, packed in with a mob of laughing and attractive girls with suit-cases in the aisles, in the racks over their heads, and in their laps.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we met this way?” cried Katherine, while Peggy was trying to hand the remaining untraveled bits of their tickets to the perspiring conductor. “We’ll see our new rooms for the first time together, and we’ll make a very nice impression on the inhabitants of Ambler House because we can plan out some kind of grand entry to appeal to them.”

Peggy laughed. “It’s an awfully big place we’re going to,” she said, looking about at the swaying crowds of girls. “I’m just beginning to realize it. It will take more than our planning to make any impression at all, I think. And maybe nobody will ever notice us. It won’t be like Andrews.”

“You’re still Peggy Parsons, aren’t you? And I’m still your room-mate, Katherine Foster. And we’re going to live in one of the grandest suites on campus—oh, I don’t believe they will pass us by altogether.” And Katherine gave a little swaggering motion of her head that sent Peggy into gales of laughter.

“You’re conceited and snobbish, friend room-mate,” she giggled. “The summer has spoiled you.”

But Katherine smiled back complacently into her eyes.

Suddenly there was a curious stir all about them. The girls who had been standing in the aisle were all pushing toward the end of the car, and those seated were struggling up from under their luggage, their faces bright with anticipation.

“Katherine,” whispered Peggy, “I think we’re there!”

Oh, the world of meaning in that one sentence. The hopes, the expectations, the pleasures and good times for four whole years were summed up in it, and Katherine silently nodded her head, unable to speak.

The brakeman was already calling out something that he meant for “Hampton,” and he rounded out his shout with the long-drawn wail, “Don’t leave any articles in the car!”

As if any of those precious and bulky suit-cases could be forgotten! The stampede began in earnest as soon as the train stopped, and Peggy and Katherine found themselves swept out to the platform and jostled down the steps and thrust forward toward the station of their own college town.

The girls from the train rushed this way and that, and other girls from the college rushed to meet them. Katherine spied a taxi that had still two vacant seats.

“Come, taxi,—quick,” she gasped in Peggy’s ear. And the two went running forward, their suit-cases bumping and thumping against their knees. Before they reached the machine they saw that they were racing with a mob of other girls, all frankly eager to be the first to secure places in the last cab with a vacancy.

In every direction other taxis were whirring off, filled to overflowing with girls and bags, and here and there the rumble of hoofs mixed in, as a pair of horses drawing an old-fashioned cab likewise laden dashed off.

Peggy and Katherine were panting. It had become a very exciting race. A taller girl, with a lighter suit-case, sprinted ahead of them and reached the taxi first. But she stopped to ask the driver his price, and while she was doing so Katherine and Peggy piled in.

The taller girl turned to take her rightful place and saw two hot and beaming young ladies in the exact corner she had run so hard to claim.

She stepped back with a chagrined laugh, and Peggy and Katherine laughed too, with the utmost good nature, now that they had attained what they sought. They heard the other two occupants of their car murmuring the names of college houses to the chauffeur, and with a thrill of pride Peggy said, “Ambler House.”

“And you, miss?” the driver asked Katherine.

“Why, Ambler House, too, of course,” she said, and then blushed scarlet for fear the other girls would think her an idiot, for at the moment it had indeed seemed to her that even a taxi-cab driver ought to know that she was going to live in college wherever Peggy was.

The quaint, prim streets of the New England town were nothing but so much colored confusion to the eyes of the four in the cab. Each one had a consciousness that this perhaps was the height of life: that they would never touch anything better than this again. Riding along thus, packed tight in a taxi, through Hampton, to college for the first time.

They felt as if all previous experiences were washed away—and all future ones unknown and unguessed at. Everything was before them—the glory of being young singing in their hearts and going to their heads like wine—what wonder that they felt life had been made just for them and was already beginning to yield its fruits into their eager hands!

The cab went grating up a hill, and in a moment there was a bright stretch of green before them, with any number of red brick buildings on it, some of them covered with ivy. Hampton College was spread before their gaze without any warning to prepare them. But each girl knew, as if she had seen it often, that this was really College.

Katherine and Peggy craned their necks quite frankly out of the window, and when they drew their heads in, the other girls followed their example shamelessly.

“It looks—nice,” ventured Peggy, with a long sigh of satisfaction.

“It looks just—the way I thought it would,” answered one of the strangers, and then gave a little embarrassed laugh because her voice had sounded so thrilled.

The taxi made a sharp turn, and they were actually inside the sacred precincts of Campus—there on each side were the rows of college houses, and in the distance was a magnificent structure of stone. The morning sun shone over it all. A sense of homelikeness and a strange comfortable feeling of love for it came, even at this first view, into their hearts.

“We are to live in one of these houses,” Peggy rapturously reminded Katherine. “In a moment the taxi will stop and it will be our house. Katherine, pinch my arm. It all seems so queerly familiar, maybe I’m just dreaming it after all.”

But the taxi did stop in a minute or two, and the driver was opening the door and saying “Ambler House” in a matter-of-fact tone. The two other girls nodded good-bye to Peggy and Katherine. Katherine stepped down and was handed her bag. Peggy was conscious that the long porch of the brick house before which they had drawn up was filled with girls interestedly watching for freshman newcomers. She thought of their plan to make a good initial impression, and descended as gracefully as might be, with a charming little smile of eagerness and anticipation that was not assumed at all.

The driver was lifting down her heavy suit-case. And then quite unexpectedly came the fall that follows pride. Only, while the pride had been Peggy’s, the fall was her suit-case’s.

Thump! Thud! it went smashing down to the ground, and its bulging sides flew apart, and hair-brushes, mirrors, nightgown, kimono, and powder boxes and tooth paste all shot out in every direction and rolled ignominiously about on the campus lawn, in full view of the crowded porch of Ambler House.

Peggy’s crimson ears caught shrieks of laughter, her tear-filled eyes saw girlish figures doubling up in mirth—and under her feet and round about, the ground was white with powder, redolent with oozing perfume and strewn with her most intimate belongings.

There was something about it all that had the awful publicity of a nightmare. Such things couldn’t really happen. Oh, if she could only melt away—or wake up or even crawl back into the taxi and hide.

“Shall I help you pick the things up?”

“I’m afraid this powder can never be scraped up again. I’ve put some back into the box, but there’s quite a bit of grass and gravel mixed with it.”

She was completely surrounded by helpful girls, who had flown out from the porch, their laughter still on their lips, and were now kneeling and stooping everywhere about the scene of the catastrophe.

“Your clean shirtwaist,” cried one of these helpers sympathetically, as she pulled a fragile bit of dimity and Cluny lace from under the taxi-cab where it had fluttered. “It won’t be good for very much now until it’s laundered.”

Into the suit-case the things were tumbled with despatch but not neatness. The taxi driver was contrite, but he did not offer to touch any of the scattered feminine luggage and insisted quite audibly that there had been “too many things in there anyway.”

Katherine paid him, eying him reproachfully, and he chugged away, leaving the two heart-broken freshmen greatly discomfited by the mishap.

Thus it was that the two girls who had hoped to make so attractive an impression slunk into Ambler House with a straggling procession of merry followers behind them carrying odds and ends that refused to be crammed back into the damaged suit-case. And thus it came about also that they looked about Suite 22 with blind eyes and failed to realize that it was one of “the grandest suites on Campus” and overlooked Paradise.

Peggy sat down in a little heap on the window seat in their living-room and didn’t even appreciate that it was a window seat, and one of very, very few at college.

“I’m glad it—didn’t happen in Springfield,” was the first thing Peggy said.

“Ye-es,” admitted Katherine, standing uncertainly in the middle of the room. And then she added irrelevantly: “I think there are awfully nice girls in this house.”

Peggy buried her little burning face in the upholstery of the window seat. “Do—you?” she asked in muffled tones. “I didn’t dare look at them.”

“I thought they seemed a very—jolly set,” pursued Katherine tentatively.

She was rewarded by a rueful chuckle from the figure on the window seat.

“And anyway,” Katherine followed up her advantage, “they did notice us,—more than they do most freshmen. Paid rather particular attention, in fact.”

That was too much for happy-go-lucky little Peggy and she laughed until she shook, even while the contradictory tears ran forth from her swollen eyes and trickled through her fingers onto the green leather seat-cushion.

“I—I’ll—never go down to luncheon, Kathie,” she protested between a laugh and a sob. “I’ll never go outside this room again. I can’t possibly bear to look them in the face.”

Rap-tap-tap!

Katherine whirled toward the door and Peggy sat up.

Rap-tap-tap! It was more insistent this time, and the knob of the door turned even as Peggy called out a none too cordial “Come” that broke pathetically in the middle.

A dark-haired girl entered impetuously, a sparkle in her friendly eyes. Peggy remembered her with an inward qualm as one of the most appreciative spectators on the porch a few moments ago.

“Aren’t you folks crazy about your rooms? Have you seen the view over Paradise? It’s wonderful. I’ve been wondering who would have these. I live right across the hall—and I—I——”

Those sparkling eyes fairly danced now, and Peggy became aware of a tiny package being thrust forward by the pretty visitor.

“I saw yours was trampled, so I brought you some tooth-paste!” finished the girl, to their amazement.

She had scarcely left them, swinging mentally between indignation and bewildered gratitude, when a pair of girls came unceremoniously in upon them without knocking at all, and stood hesitating before them, arms entwined about each other and holding something half out of sight.

“I always think it’s a ghastly thing to be without powder,” one of them finally mustered the courage to say, “and I came away with two boxes. It’s rice powder, flesh tint,—I hope you like that as well as white; and I brought you some—and a chamois. Yours was muddy. I picked it up, but I parted with it again. I knew you wouldn’t possibly want it,—it couldn’t make your face anything but black.”

“And here’s a—waist.” The other was speaking now. “I thought you might be—traveling light, and—since nobody’s trunks have come, please wear this down to luncheon. It’s my best one, so I won’t deprecate it at all. I think it’s a darling, and if you’ll give it its first wearing, I’ll be only too happy.”

Katherine glanced across at Peggy and smiled. Her room-mate was wiping away the last gleam of moisture from her eyes, and the inner sunlight of her spirit was beginning to shine through the gloom.

She rose and went toward the girls, but they laid their offerings on a chair and withdrew. While Peggy was looking after them appreciatively, another stranger entered on a similar mission.

For fifteen minutes, while Peggy and Katherine were making themselves presentable for luncheon, the gift-bearers kept coming, leaving their present on the dressing-table in the bedroom or the window seat in the living-room, sometimes saying nothing at all, and sometimes a great deal.

“You won’t mind going down now?” Katherine asked.

“N-not so much,” admitted Peggy, putting dabs of perfume out of various bottles here and there on her cheered-up countenance, on her fluffy gold-brown hair, and on the new waist, contributed.

For at least six girls had brought perfume and loyal Peggy meant to have one represented just as truly as another, so she followed this neutral course of using all,—with a resulting odor that was anything but neutral.

As she went into the big dining-room, each giver could distinctly discern the pervading sweetness of her own scent bottle and was satisfied.

It seemed to Peggy that every face was lifted and turned toward her as she and Katherine came in. There was a temptation to walk with lowered eyes, and sink into the seat the head waitress might indicate, without meeting a single person’s gaze.

But casting this desire aside, she went in bravely, her eyes taking in the whole room. And every girl smiled back at her with the very essence of friendship and proprietorship, for there was hardly a girl in the room who had not contributed something that the radiant freshman was even then wearing, or had just made use of.

So Peggy did not have to wait until the others in her house had learned to love her, but she was taken from the first day into their hearts. And she felt the warmth of their love around her even while she went through so prosaic a ceremony as the partaking of a meager college luncheon.