She turned the pages eagerly.  “It is a bloodstone.  The very thing for Jack, for his birthday is in March, too, and it is such a dark, unpretentious stone that he would like it. But—­it costs eight dollars.”

She said it in an awed tone as if she were naming a small fortune.

“Maybe we can think of some way for you to earn it,” said Betty, encouragingly.  “I’ll set my wits to work this evening as soon as I’ve finished looking over the A class themes.  Because none of the girls has ever done such a thing before in the school is no reason why you should not.  Look!  This is what I came in to show you.”

It was several pages from Lloyd’s last letter, and the samples of some new dresses she was having made.  For a little space the wolf at the door drew in its claws, and Mary forgot her financial straits.  Early in the term Betty had divined how much the sharing of this correspondence meant to Mary.  She could not fail to see how eagerly she followed the winsome princess through her gay social season in town, rejoicing over her popularity, interested in everything she did and wore and treasuring every mention of her in the home papers.  The old Colonel sent Betty the Courier-Journal, and the society page was regularly turned over to Mary.  There was a corner in her scrap-book marked, “My Chum,” rapidly filling with accounts of balls, dinners and house-parties at which she had been a guest.  This last letter had several messages in it for Mary, so Betty left the page containing them with her, knowing they would be folded away in the scrap-book with the samples, as soon as her back was turned.

“I was out at Anchorage for this last week-end,” ran one of the messages.  “And it rained so hard one night that what was to have been an informal dance was turned into an old-fashioned candy-pull.  Not more than half a dozen guests managed to get there.  Tell Mary that I tried to distinguish myself by making some of that Mexican pecan candy that they used to have such success with at the Wigwam.  But it was a flat failure, and I think I must have left out some important ingredient.  Ask her to please send me the recipe if she can remember it.”

“Probably it failed because she didn’t have the real Mexican sugar,” said Mary, at the end of the reading.  “It comes in a cone, wrapped in a queer kind of leaf, so I’m sure she didn’t have it.  I’ll write out the recipe as soon as I get back from my geometry recitation, and add a foot-note, explaining about the sugar.”

Somehow it was hard for Mary to keep her mind on lines and angles that next hour.  She kept seeing a merry group in the Wigwam kitchen.  Lloyd and Jack and Phil Tremont were all ranged around the white table, cracking pecans, and picking out the firm full kernels, while Joyce presided over the bubbling kettle on the stove.  She wondered if Lloyd had enjoyed her grown-up party as much as she had that other one, when Jack said such utterly ridiculous things in pigeon English, like the old Chinese vegetable man, and Phil cake-walked and parodied funny coon-songs till their sides ached with laughing.