“You’re in my class, aren’t you?” she whispered quickly.  “It’s right over here, and there’s a seat beside me.  I don’t know any one either, and I’m so glad to see you, so I’ll have some one to talk to.”

Marcelle never answered, but smiled with a quick flash of appreciation, the smile which always seemed to illumine her rather grave face.  She followed Kit back to the latter’s seat, and Norma exchanged glances with her right-hand neighbor, Amy Parker.  Kit was altogether too new to realize just exactly what she had done.  Being the Dean’s grandniece, she considered herself unconsciously a privileged person.  As a matter of course, Miss Daphne had accompanied her that morning, and introduced her to four or five girls in the sophomore “prep” class, who came from the representative best families of the town.  Also, as a matter of course, she had been welcomed as one of them, but Kit, with her democratic notions, never even realized that she occupied one of the seats of the mighty, in a circle of the favored few, and that she had smashed all tradition by introducing into that circle a Beaubien.  In fact, even if she had known, she would probably have been thoroughly indignant at any such spirit among the girls themselves.

Jean and Helen were the natural-born aristocrats in the family, Kit always said.  They loved to feel themselves aloof and not part of the populace.

“The sedan chair and palanquin for both of you,” Kit had been wont to say, scornfully, “but give me a good horse and a wide trail, or if I can’t have the horse, I’ll hike.”

And here she loved to quote Stevenson’s “Vagabond” to them.

    “Give to me the life I love,
      Let the lave go by me,
     Give the jolly heaven above
      And the byway nigh me.

    “Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
      Nor a friend to know me;
     All I ask, the heaven above,
      And the road below me.”

The whole morning was taken up with the assigning of students to classes.  Kit loved the curious bustle and excitement of it all.  It was so different from the small high school back home, and there were many more boys and girls than she had expected to see.  Almost, as she passed from room to room, through the different buildings, she wished she were staying right there as a year pupil.  Amy introduced her to her closest friend, Peggy Barrows, a girl from South Dakota, who took them up to her quarters in one of the dormitories.

“Dear me,” Kit said, looking around her speculatively.  “I wish I were going to live here.  Peggy, you’ll have to entertain us often.  It’s so kind of solitary and restful, isn’t it, up here?”

“Solitary,” scoffed Peggy.  “I’ve been here four days getting settled, and you might just as well call the side show of a circus solitary.  There isn’t even the ghost of privacy.  I’m mobbed every time I try to sit and meditate.”

“Who wants to meditate, anyway?” asked Amy.  “Don’t you feel ’the rushing torrent of ambition’s flood sweeping away the barriers’ and—­what else did the Dean say?”