“Oh, and listen, Kit,” Norma broke in; “you know that suede brown leather table cover of mine; I just took and slashed it around the edges and bent it over an old tam-o’-shanter crown and it looks exactly like the hat she wore.  You know I’ve been considering rather seriously.  Don’t you really think that I’m peculiarly fitted for this sort of a career?  Of course I’d only play Shakespearian parts, although I’d love to be Joan of Arc like Maude Adams was at Harvard, or play the old Greek tragedies at that Stadium place, somewhere in California.  I’ve been studying Electra a little bit.”

“Have you?” questioned Kit, kindly.  “You dear child, you.  So young and yet so aspiring.  Finish your chocolate ice cream soda, and we’ll run along.  Rex just came with his car and we can all pile into it.”

The rehearsal passed off splendidly, barring sundry interpolations by Kit into Orlando’s flights of fancy.

“I think he would have had to have been much more interesting to have held the love of such a girl as Rosalind,” she protested.  “Heroes are awful people anyway, I think.  The only ones I really like are explorers.  Uncle Cassius said the other day that the most unique experience was to be the first white man to step foot on new territory.  I may take up forestry as a profession, but I’d much rather be a woman explorer.”

“Deserts, islands or mountain peaks?” queried Amy, as she dipped into her store of supplies under the couch for some hasty refreshments.

“Caves, I think,” said Kit, darkly; “caves or islands.  Don’t give me anything to eat, ’cause I have to look up something in the library before I go home, and I’m late for lunch now.”

“Just pimento cheese on crackers, and I’ve got some chocolate marshmallows here somewhere.”  Amy’s voice was muffled under the couch cover.  But the clock on the mantel pointed at twelve-fifteen, and Kit knew the Dean’s punctilious regard for keeping meal hours.

The library was unoccupied, apparently.  Kit went over to the lower book shelves which contained the reference books on archaeology, dragging a low stool after her.

“A-men-o-taph,” she said, under her breath.  “Likewise Semele.”

With the two volumes on her knees, she started to read up the references which the Dean wanted, when all at once she was conscious of some one who stood in the embrasured window at the west end of the room, looking at her.  For a moment Kit was absolutely speechless, not believing the evidence of her own eyes.  But the next moment Billie’s own laugh, when he found out he had been discovered, startled her with its reality.

“Billie Ellis,” she exclaimed, springing to her feet and scattering reference books and note paper helter-skelter.  “How on earth did you ever get way out here?”

Billie shook hands with her, coloring boyishly, as he always did at any display of emotion, and trying to act as if it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for him to appear at Delphi, Wis., when he was supposed to be at Washington in school.