Mr. Hammond looked out of the door of the limousine before he closed it.

“Remember, Ruth Fielding, I shall be on the lookout for what you promised me.”

“Oh, yes, sir!” Ruth cried, all in a flutter, for the moment having forgotten the scenario she proposed to write.

“That’s a promise!” he said again gaily, and closed the door.  The big car rolled away and left the three friends at the gateway.

“What’s a promise, Ruth Fielding?” demanded her chum, with immense curiosity.

Ruth blushed and showed some confusion.  “It’s—­it’s a secret,” she stammered.

“A secret from me?” cried Helen, in amazement.

“I—­I couldn’t tell even you, dearie, just now,” Ruth said, with sudden seriousness.  “But you shall know about it before anybody else.”

“That Mr. Hammond is in it.”

“Yes,” admitted her chum.  “That is just it.  I don’t feel that I can speak to anybody about it yet.”

“Oh! then it’s his secret?”

“Partly,” Ruth said, her eyes dancing, for there and then, right at that very moment, she fell upon the subject for the first scenario she intended to submit to Mr. Hammond.  It was “Curiosity”—­a new version of Pandora’s Box.

Helen was such a sweet-tempered girl that her chum’s little mystery did not cause her more than momentary vexation.

Besides, their vacation time was now very short.  Many things had to be discussed about the coming semester.  At its end, in June, Ruth and Helen hoped to graduate from Briarwood Hall.

The thought of graduating from the school they loved so much was one of mingled pleasure and pain.  Old Briarwood! where they had had so much fun—­so many girlish sorrows—­friends, enemies, struggles, triumphs, failures and successes!  Neither chum could contemplate graduation lightly.

“If we go to college together, it will never seem like Briarwood Hall,” Helen sighed.  “College will be so big.  We shall be lost among so many girls—­some of them grown women!”

“Goodness!” laughed Ruth, suddenly, “we’ll be almost ‘grown women’ ourselves before we get through college.”

“Oh, don’t!” exclaimed Helen.  “I don’t want to think of that.”

What was ahead of the chums did trouble them.  Their future school life was a mystery.  There was no prophet to tell them of the exciting and really wonderful things that were to happen to them at Briarwood during the coming term.

CHAPTER VII

“SWEETBRIARS ALL”

“Oh, dear me!” complained Nettie Parsons, “I never can do it.”

“’In the bright Lexicon of Youth, there is no such word as “fail,"’” quoted Mercy Curtis, grandiloquently.

“That must be a pretty poor reference book to have in one’s library, then,” said Helen, making fun of the old saying which the lame girl had repeated.  “How do we know—­perhaps there are other important words left out—­A bas le Lexicon of Youth!”