The gong sounded in the hall below for afternoon classes, and there was just time to snatch a little refreshment before they joined the other girls trooping through the corridors.  Kit found herself watching Marcelle.  There was a peculiar aloofness about the girl which seemed to put almost a wall of defense around her.  She was intensely interested in everything, one could see that plainly, except the other students, and it seemed as if she simply overlooked them.  When Kit came down the staircase, she glanced into the library and saw Marcelle in there alone, bending down before the long wall bookcases.  Across the wide hall there were groups of boys and girls in the two long double parlors, laughing and talking together, and every couch and settee along the T-shaped hall was occupied, but Marcelle was alone.

Whoever had built Hope College had managed to work out some of his dreams of old world beauty.  The library was wainscoted in some dull satin finished wood, with the graining of olive wood.  In the west wall was set a deeply embrasured mullioned window of stained glass, with the figure of a young girl in white in college cap and gown, her face upturned, as she seemed to come towards one through a garden of foxgloves, pale-pink and hyacinth in hue.  Beneath was the one word, Hope.  Scattered about the room on top of bookcases and shelves were the usual beloved bits of bronze and statuary, Dante’s head, the Nike, with widespread wings, busts of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whitman, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Louisa Alcott, and a beautiful bowed head of Mrs; Browning, her curls half-shadowing her face.

Marcelle had a volume of “Treasure Island” in her hand, illustrated in color.  She turned in surprise at the touch of Kit’s hand on her shoulder.

“I thought we could walk down towards the bluff together, because we go the same way,” said the latter.  “How do you like it here?”

“I like it,” responded Marcelle, slowly, with a certain dignified shyness that was characteristic of her.  “My mother has told me all about it.  She liked the library when she was here.  She told me where her room was up-stairs, too, but I did not want to go up while the girls were there.”

“Let’s go up now, while they’re all down-stairs,” Kit suggested impulsively.  “I’ll take you.  Which dormitory was she in?”

“Her name was Mary Douglas.  It is the Douglas Dormitory.  Her father was one of the founders here, Malcolm Douglas.”

Kit listened in utter amazement and with a rising sense of joy.  Here was Marcelle Beaubien, flouted and disdained by the little crowd of girls who happened to live in a certain restricted district of Delphi, but claiming her grandfather was a founder of the college.  At that very moment Kit planned her surprise on the girls.

As they walked through the hall together, Pauline and the other girls followed them with their glances and smiled.  The two paused before a big bronze tablet with the name of the founders on it.  There it was, third from the last, Malcolm Douglas, and date, 1871.