Jack did not go back to the office the first of September.  It was the middle of the month before he made the attempt.  Norman wheeled him over on his way to school, and Mary, standing in the door to watch them start, felt the tears spring to her eyes as she compared this pitiful going to the buoyant stride with which he used to start to work.  Still, he was so much better than they had dared to hope he would be, that when she went back to her room she picked up a red pencil and marked the date on her calendar with a star.

Then she remembered that this was the day the girls would be trooping back to Warwick Hall, and she recalled the opening day the year before, when she had been among them.  She wondered who was taking possession of her room, and if the new girls would be as devoted to Betty as the old ones were.  She could picture them all, driving up the avenue, singing as they came; then Hawkins’s imposing reception and Madam Chartley’s greeting.  How she longed to be in the bustle of unpacking, and to make the rounds of all her favourite haunts by the river and in the beautiful old garden!  Dorene and Cornie wouldn’t be there.  They were graduated and gone.  But Elsie and A.O. and Margaret Elwood and Betty—­as she named them over such a homesick pang seized her, that it seemed as if she could not bear the thought of never going back.

The thought of all she was missing, drove her as it used to do, to her shadow-chum for sympathy, and Lloyd was in her thoughts all day.  Somehow, when Huldah came back from the grocery, bringing her a letter from Lloyd, she was not at all surprised, although it was the first one she had received from her since she left school, except a little note of sympathy right after Jack’s accident.

The surprise came when she opened the letter.  She read it over and over, and then, because Jack was at the office and her mother at a neighbour’s, she turned to her long-neglected journal for a confidante.  She had to hunt through all the drawers of her desk for it, it had been hidden away so long.  She felt that the news in the letter was worthy a place in her good times book, for it recorded Lloyd’s happiness, which was as dear to her as her own.

“Oh, little Red Book,” she wrote, “what an amazing secret I am going to give you to hold! Lloyd is engaged, and not to Phil! She has been engaged since last June to Rob Moore.  It is not to be announced formally until Christmas, and they are not to be married for a long time, but Eugenia knows, and Joyce, and her very most intimate friends.  She wanted me to know, and to hear it from herself, because she felt that no one could wish her joy more sincerely than her ‘little chum.’  I am so glad she really called me that, after all my months of make believe.

“But it was the surprise of my life to find that Rob is The Prince and not Phil.  Poor Phil!  I am sure he was disappointed, and somehow I keep thinking of that more than of Lloyd’s happiness.  I don’t see how she could prefer anybody else to the Best Man.”