“Thank you and good night!” whispered three voices.  A single figure still lingered.  The stranger leaned over the window sill.  “Will you permit me to light my cigar here?  It might attract attention if I struck a match outside.”  By the upspringing light he saw the figure of Kate very charmingly framed in by the window.  The match burnt slowly out in his fingers.  Kate smiled mischievously.  The astute young woman had detected the pitiable subterfuge.  For what else did she stand at the head of her class, and had doting parents paid three years’ tuition?

The storm had passed, and the sun was shining quite cheerily in the eastern recitation room the next morning when Miss Kate, whose seat was nearest the window, placing her hand pathetically upon her heart, affected to fall in bashful and extreme agitation upon the shoulder of Carry, her neighbor.  “He has come,” she gasped in a thrilling whisper.  “Who?” asked Carry sympathetically, who never clearly understood when Kate was in earnest.  “Who?—­Why, the man who rescued us last night!  I saw him drive to the door this moment.  Don’t speak; I shall be better in a moment—­there!” she said, and the shameless hypocrite passed her hand pathetically across her forehead with a tragic air.

“What can he want?” asked Carry, whose curiosity was excited.  “I don’t know,” said Kate, suddenly relapsing into gloomy cynicism.  “Possibly to put his five daughters to school; perhaps to finish his young wife, and warn her against us.”

“He didn’t look old, and he didn’t seem like a married man,” rejoined Addy thoughtfully.

“That was his art, you poor creature!” returned Kate scornfully.  “You can never tell anything of these men, they are so deceitful.  Besides, it’s just my fate!”

“Why, Kate,” began Carry, in serious concern.

“Hush!  Miss Walker is saying something,” said Kate, laughing.

“The young ladies will please give attention,” said a slow, perfunctory voice.  “Miss Carry Tretherick is wanted in the parlor.”

Meantime Mr. Jack Prince, the name given on the card, and various letters and credentials submitted to the Rev. Mr. Crammer, paced the somewhat severe apartment known publicly as the “reception parlor” and privately to the pupils as “purgatory.”  His keen eyes had taken in the various rigid details, from the flat steam “radiator,” like an enormous japanned soda cracker, that heated one end of the room to the monumental bust of Dr. Crammer that hopelessly chilled the other; from the Lord’s Prayer, executed by a former writing master in such gratuitous variety of elegant calligraphic trifling as to abate considerably the serious value of the composition, to three views of Genoa from the Institute, which nobody ever recognized, taken on the spot by the drawing teacher; from two illuminated texts of Scripture in an English letter, so gratuitously and hideously remote as to chill all human interest, to a large photograph of the senior class, in which the