“Girls, in about ten minutes you’re going to have the surprise of your lives,” cried Nancy Brown, joining a group of her friends at the High School gate.

“What is it, Nancy? Do tell us, please,” cried half a dozen voices at once.

“No, you must wait,” answered Nancy. “If I told you what it was, I wouldn’t enjoy seeing your faces when the thing happened.”

“Nancy, you have always got some mystery on foot,” put in her most intimate friend, Elinor Butler. “Is this one animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Fine or superfine?”

“Can it speak?”

“Is it as large as a house?”

“Don’t all talk at once,” exclaimed Nancy. “I’ll tell you this much. It’s animal and it’s superfine. And”—she wrinkled her brows—“and it’s mineral, too, I suppose.”

“Superfine? At least it’s a woman, then?” cried all the girls in a chorus.

“Yes,” laughed Nancy, who loved nothing better than to excite the curiosity of her friends to the utmost and then launch a genuine sensation into their midst.

“Does the superfine animal wear the mineral?” demanded Elinor.

“No, she doesn’t wear it. She’s in it.”

“In it? How strange,” exclaimed another girl. “Perhaps it’s a lady oyster in her shell.”

“There’s no surprise in an oyster unless there’s a pearl in it, goosey,” teased Nancy. “But here it comes! Here it comes!” she cried, clapping her hands joyfully, while six pairs of eyes peered curiously down the street, which, by gentle degrees, became a country road. The trim sidewalks of the little seaport town of West Haven became grassy paths and the pretty lawns broadened into flat green meadows.

Far down the road a brilliant red object could be seen approaching. It was enveloped in a cloud of dust and it moved with great rapidity.

“Why, it’s nothing but a red automobile,” cried Elinor, in disappointment.

“Yes,” admitted Nancy, “it’s an automobile, but there’s something unusual about it besides its color.”

“A girl is running it,” announced Mary Price, whose clear, dark eyes always seemed to be looking into the distance. “A girl is running it, and no one is with her, and——”

But the motor car was now in full view. It was a graceful little machine large enough to hold five or six people comfortably, its body painted a warm and pleasing shade of red, its cushions upholstered in a slightly darker shade which harmonized perfectly with the red of the body. A young girl, sitting on the front seat, was running the car as easily and steadily as an experienced chauffeur. Making a graceful curve, she turned into the driveway which led to the school grounds and presently drew up under a large shed, where people were in the habit of hitching their horses and vehicles on Field Day, or when football was in season.

“Who is she?” demanded Nancy’s schoolmates in a whisper.

“Why, she’s Miss Helen Campbell’s cousin, Wilhelmina Campbell.”

“Do you mean our old friend, Billie?” asked Elinor.

“The same,” said Nancy, in a low voice, for Billie Campbell was now approaching within hearing distance. “Her mother’s dead and her father’s brought her here to live with Miss Campbell while he builds a railroad in Russia, and she’s going to High School and she’s in our class and she’s coming to and fro every day in her own motor car.”

Nancy was speaking as rapidly as a talking machine going at full speed.

Billie, as her father had always called her, might have guessed that she was the subject of all this buzzing undertone of conversation among the school girls; but she was too well accustomed to strange faces and new places to feel stiff and shy now at the looks of curiosity which were turned on her. On the contrary, the West Haven girls themselves felt a little ill at ease and countrified in the presence of this new sophomore, who, with her father, an engineer, had lived in many countries and seen a great deal of that mysterious outside world which sleepy, quiet West Haven had never troubled itself much about.

But Billie Campbell was not destined to renew her acquaintance just then with these childhood friends of hers. A slender, very pretty girl, beautifully dressed, hurried out of the school building and called:

“Oh, Miss Campbell, may I speak with you a moment?”

“We might have known it,” cried Nancy Brown savagely. “If Billie Campbell hadn’t owned a motor car, Belle Rogers would never have given herself the trouble even to speak to her.”

You perhaps know what a dangerous quality snobbishness is in a girl’s school. A very little of it is like a drop of strong poison in a pail of water. It pollutes the whole pail. So it was at West Haven High School. Belle Rogers, the prettiest and richest girl in town, had picked out six more or less wealthy and intimate friends in the sophomore class and constituted herself leader of what they called “The Mystic Seven.” These seven girls held themselves aloof from the poorer girls in the class and committed the unpardonable sin of snubbing every girl outside their charmed circle.

Very bitter were the feelings of the other ten sophomores against the “Mystic Seven,” who refused to mingle in the sports of the class and kept themselves apart at recess, talking in low, mysterious voices and laughing behind their pocket handkerchiefs when the other girls strolled by.

“They always make me feel shabbier than I really am,” Mary Price had once said.

And now the “Mystic Seven” had snatched up this nice, athletic-looking, new sophomore, whom many of them remembered as a bright, romping little girl years before.

“I suppose they’ll have to call themselves ‘The Mystic Eight’ now,” said one of the girls, a little bitterly.

“Can’t we ask her to join the ‘Blue Birds’?” put in Elinor Butler, who was eligible in point of wealth to enter the richer society, but had coldly declined the honor and had formed a society herself, called the “Blue Birds.”

“She couldn’t belong to both clubs,” said Nancy, “and you may be sure she has accepted the invitation of that little golden-haired, blue-eyed Belle Rogers, who put on an extra soft pedal even to call out her name.”

“Well, Billie Campbell will probably never have cause to know that Belle’s tongue is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, so what’s the odds,” observed Mary Price philosophically. “We got on perfectly well before she came and I suppose we can manage to support life pretty comfortably even if she is a member of the ‘Mystic Seven.’”

Her friends laughed, as they strolled by twos and threes into the broad, arched entrance leading into the corridor of the building. Mary Price often relieved their wounded feelings by ending discussions concerning the “Mystic Seven” with a joke, although not one of them had been cut more deeply than she herself by the cruel speeches of Belle Rogers and her friends; for, since the death of Captain Price, Mary Price and her mother, as you will see later, had had a hard struggle to make both ends meet.

In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all her arts on the unsuspecting Wilhelmina Campbell.

“We have never met,” she was saying, “but I heard you were going to enter our class and I wanted to be the first to welcome you.”

“Thank you,” said Billie, who had a boyish, direct way of answering people.

“We wanted to know,” went on Belle quickly, “if you wouldn’t become a member of our society, the Mystic Seven. It is the most exclusive and nicest society in the school; the seven nicest girls in West Haven. We are all intimate friends, you know.”

Billie gazed with admiration into Belle’s lovely, childlike face. Her own hair was straight and secretly she had always admired curls. Belle’s pale golden hair curled about her low forehead in soft ringlets. Her great china-blue eyes looked appealingly into Billie’s gray ones, and her rosy lips, which were much too thin when her face was in repose, parted with a winning smile. She was dressed in blue a little darker than her eyes and a small blue velvet toque was perched coquettishly on top of her curls.

“She looks like a picture pasted inside of an old trunk mamma used to have,” said Billie to herself. “I could almost believe she was a bisque doll. I never saw anything like her.”

“You will join us, won’t you?” went on Belle wistfully.

“I’m afraid I should be one too many and make an unlucky number. Seven is supposed to be lucky, isn’t it?”

“Oh, we’re not superstitious,” laughed Belle. “We can change the name to the ‘Happy Eight,’ or something of that sort. We are looking for nice girls, and as soon as I saw you I knew you would be the one for us. We want to enlarge the club.”

“Dear me,” said Billie thoughtfully, “in a class of seventeen girls are only seven nice enough to be asked to join your club?”

“Oh, they are nice enough,” replied Belle. “Elinor Butler is really quite nice, but they are not just our sort, don’t you know, and mamma has always cautioned me to be very careful about my companions.”

“Elinor Butler?” questioned Billie. “She is my old friend, and Nancy Brown and Mary Price? Aren’t any of them members?”

Just then the gong for chapel boomed out in the September stillness and Belle could only shake her head for denial, as the two girls hurried into the building.

“I don’t think I could ever get on with that blonde doll baby,” thought Billie, as she followed Belle into the chapel for morning prayer, which always opened the day at West Haven High School.

At recess the new sophomore was quite overwhelmed by the attentions of the Mystic Seven. They showed her the building and the grounds, the class locker rooms and the gymnasium, which interested her most of all. And in return she showed them her motor car. But, somehow, she did not quite like these stylish and rather over-dressed young girls. Their conversation really bored her and she was disappointed.

It had been her own suggestion to go to West Haven High School when her father was summoned abroad to build a railroad.

“I think it’s high time I met some nice outdoor girls, papa,” she had said. “I am afraid of boarding school girls. They are so different from you.”

Her father had laughed joyfully over this speech.

“I hope there’s not much resemblance between me and a boarding school girl, my little Billie,” he said, pinching her cheek.

And now the nice open-air girls whom she had recalled with pleasure after a summer spent in West Haven had not come near enough even to greet her and she had been obliged to pair off with seven fashion plates.

“It’s perfectly maddening,” she exclaimed to herself, giving the turf on the campus a savage little kick. “Nancy and Elinor actually avoid meeting my eyes as if I were some one unfit to know. I wish I had consented to go to boarding school, after all, instead of coming to Cousin Helen. I don’t want to belong to a silly society that does nothing but have afternoon teas. I want to play basket ball and go on long tramps with other girls and have picnics. I’m so disappointed, I could weep aloud.”

This was the picture Billie had drawn in her mind of life at West Haven High School and here she was an outcast from all the good times and open air games of the class, simply because not one of her old friends would come near her. She long remembered that first day at school as the loneliest and most wretched of her whole life.

Then the last gong sounded and everybody went home except Billie, who had an appointment with Miss Gray, the principal. After the interview, in a rebellious and disconsolate humor, homesick for her father and disappointed with the whole world, she cranked up her red car and whirled away toward the open country.

As she sped along the road she passed the three friends of that summer of years ago, walking briskly away from town. They did not even look up as she whirled by and the lump in her throat grew so big that it resolved itself into a sob and two hot tears trickled down her cheeks.

“Perhaps they’re going over to the woods; just what I would have loved to have done,” wept the disappointed young girl, whose life had been a lonely one in spite of her father’s devotion and constant companionship.

She was still drying her eyes when she noticed some distance ahead a man leap into the road and wave his arms violently. Billie slowed down and came to a stop; for at the side of the road another very ill-looking man was lying prone on his back with closed eyes and slightly parted lips.

“What is it?” she asked. “Has your friend been hurt?”

“No, miss,” answered the man who had stopped her, “but he has walked fifteen miles to-day and I am afraid he’s about all in. I am trying to get him to his house, but I can’t carry him and he can’t take another step.”

“Where is his house?” asked Billie.

“Are you familiar with these parts, miss?”

“No,” she answered.

“It’s just up that lane about a mile. Only a matter of five minutes to you.”

“Can you get him into the car?” asked Billie, noticing that this rather sinister looking stranger had only one arm; also that his right eye was out and there was a long scar across his upper lip.

“Easily,” he replied, and without another word he expeditiously supported his friend to the motor car and lifted him into the back seat.

“Poor fellow,” exclaimed Billie sympathetically. “It’s well I happened along.”

The sick man was indeed a wretched looking object, with a thin, lantern-jawed face, hollow feverish eyes and a sunken chest. Occasionally he coughed behind his hands apologetically.

“Down the lane, did you say?” she asked.

“Yes, miss, you can just see the house. It’s the gray one up near the woods.”

“I’ll have him there in a few minutes,” she answered, putting on all speed.

The little machine flew along the hard sandy road like a redbird on the wing. Billie occasionally glanced over her shoulder at the sick man and each time her eyes met his, which seemed to burn like coals of fire. She had not liked the looks of the other man. His one remaining eye was much too close to his hooked nose; but the sick man appealed to her sympathies. Billie’s nature was not a suspicious one. She had encountered many people in her life, and it is only people who have lived out of the world who are apt to suspect strangers.

As she drew up the car in front of what appeared to be a very old, long-deserted fisherman’s house and turned to see her passengers alight, she found the one-eyed man bending over his companion.

“He’s fainted, miss,” he said. “If you’ll go around back of the house to the old well and draw up a pail of cold water, I guess we can revive him. Just let down the pail by the wheel at the side—you’ll see the handle,—and then get a glass or pitcher or something ’round there in the shed.”

As the man was apparently very busy loosening the neck-band of his friend’s shirt, there seemed nothing else for Billie to do but to obey his directions. In fact, her sympathies were so deeply aroused that she was more than eager to help.

She dashed around the corner in an instant, rushed to the old well, and exerting her strength turned the handle of the rusty wheel around and around while the rattling chain lowered the moss-covered bucket deeper and deeper until it struck the water. Waiting only until the bucket was filled, she began to raise it as rapidly as she could, but her muscles were sorely tried by the stubbornness of the rusty wheel and the additional weight of the water.

The thought of the exhausted man spurred her on, however, and at length, flushed and perspiring, she succeeded in drawing the bucket to a little shelf where she left it while she searched for a receptacle in which to carry the water. She found no difficulty in pushing open a loosely-hung door at the end of the shed, and, after groping around a moment or two in the semi-darkness, she discovered a battered tin pail. Hastening back with it, she rinsed and filled it, and hurried around to the front of the house.

As she turned the corner, she stopped short! Where were the two men? Where was her machine? Where—was—her—machine?

Too dazed to move, Billie stood rooted to the spot while the water trickled out of a hole in the pail and made a little pool at her feet.

Suddenly she gasped, “They must be around the other corner. They must be!”

But they were not!—and then Billie noticed the tracks in the crushed grass that told the tale. The motor car had been turned and driven away up the lane!

Billie sank down on the step in front of the old house almost too spent with her exertions and her shock to think.

Then she flung down the pail and rushed up the lane as though she would try to catch the vanished car,—but she stopped as abruptly with a half laugh.

“They may be miles and miles away by this time,—they had time enough while I was fussing over that old well. And the chain made such a noise and the wheel creaked so, I never heard another sound!”

Billie’s eyes filled with indignant tears as she began slowly to saunter back to the old house. She felt somehow impelled to return to the scene of her loss, perhaps to persuade herself that it was really so.

As she neared the spot where she had last seen her red car, she noticed a slip of paper blowing lightly about. Idly she picked it up and glanced over the words written upon it. Then she stood still and caught her breath as she realized what they meant.

“Stay here. Tell no one. Back soon.”

That was the message that Billie read, and she did not doubt for a moment that it was intended for her.

“Yes, perhaps you will come back, and perhaps you won’t,” she said half aloud. “Maybe you think that I think that you have gone for a doctor. But I don’t. You are two mean, wicked men to outwit a girl like that. I’ll never see my car again!”

Just as Billie uttered this despairing cry, she heard a distant hail, and then another.

“Who is coming now?” she thought. “It’s too soon to expect my sick (?) passenger and his one-eyed friend, and anyway I hear no car,——nor anything else, now,” she added. “Maybe I imagined it. Oh, I’d like to be a man for about five minutes! Then they wouldn’t dare!”