Poor Ann had neither—­she was merely confused and miserable.

She saw the other girls of her room—­and their close friends in the neighboring quartette—­going cheerfully about the term’s work.  They had interests that the girl from the West, with her impoverished mind, could not even appreciate.

She had to study so hard—­even some of the simplest lessons—­that she had little time to learn games.  She did not care for gymnasium work, although there were probably few girls at the school as muscular as herself.  Tennis seemed silly to her.  Nobody rode at the Hall, and she longed to bestride a pony and dash off for a twenty-mile canter.

Nothing that she was used to doing on the ranch would appeal to these girls here—­Ann was quite sure of that.  Ruth and the others who had been with them for that all-too-short month at Silver Ranch seemed to have forgotten the riding, and the roping, and all.

Then, Helen had her violin—­and loved it.  Ruth was practicing singing all the time she could spare, for she was already a prominent member of the Glee Club.  When the girl of the Red Mill sang, Ann Hicks felt her heart throb and the tears rise in her eyes.  She loved Ruth’s kind of music; yet she, herself, could not carry a tune.

Mercy was strictly attentive to her own books.  Mercy was a bookworm—­nor did she like being asked questions about her studies.  Those first few weeks Ann Hicks’s recitations did not receive very high marks.

Often some of the girls who did not know her very well laughed because she carried books belonging to the primary grade.  Ann Hicks had many studies to make up that her mates had been drilled in while they were in the lower classes.

One day at mail time (and in a boarding school that is a most important hour) Ann received a very tempting-looking box by parcel post.  She had been initiated into the meaning of “boxes from home.”  Even Aunt Alvirah had sent a box to Ruth, filled with choicest homemade dainties.

Ann expected nothing like that.  Uncle Bill would never think of it—­and he wouldn’t know what to buy, anyway.  The box fairly startled the girl from Silver Ranch.

“What is it?  Something good to eat, I bet,” cried Heavy, who was on hand, of course.  “Open it, Ann—­do.”

“Come on!  Let’s see what the goodies are,” urged another girl, but who smiled behind her hand.

“I don’t know who would send me anything,” said Ann, slowly.

“Never mind the address.  Open it!” cried a third speaker, and had Ann noted it, she would have realized that some of the most trying girls in the school had suddenly surrounded her.

With trembling fingers she tore off the outside wrapper without seeing that the box had been mailed at the local post office—­Lumberton!

A very decorative box was enclosed.

“H-m-m!” gasped Heavy.  “Nothing less than fancy nougatines in that.”