“Oh, Betty!  Have they really been accepted?” cried Mary, almost tumbling down the stairs in her excitement, and forgetting the respectful “Miss” with which she always prefaced her name when with the other girls.

Betty waved a letter which she had just received.  “Yes, the editor took them both, and wants more—­a series of boarding-school stories.  One of these girls heard me telling Miss Chilton about it,” she added, laughing, “and to hear them you would think it is an event of national importance.”

“It is to us,” insisted A.O.  “We are so proud to think it is our teacher, our special favourite one, who’s turned out to be a sure-enough author, and we aren’t going to let you go until you promise to sit for a picture for us.”

“Then I suppose I shall be forced to promise,” said Betty, smiling down into the eager faces which surrounded her, and breaking away from the encircling arms which held her determinedly.  It was good to feel that she had the ardent admiration of her pupils, though it was burdensome sometimes to contemplate that so many of them took her as a model.

“I’m going to write too, some day,” she overheard one of them say as she made her laughing escape.  “I’d rather be an author than anything else in the world.  It’s so nice to dash off a new book every year or so and have a fortune come rolling in, and everybody praising you and trying to make your acquaintance and begging for your autograph.”

“It is not so easy as it sounds, Judith,” Betty paused to say.  “There’s a long hard road to travel before one reaches such a mountain top as that.  I’ve been at it for years, and I can only count that I’ve made a very small beginning of the journey.”

Still, it seemed quite a good-sized achievement, when later in the morning she beckoned Mary into her room, and watched her eyes grow wide over the check which she showed her.

“One hundred dollars for just two short stories!” Mary exclaimed.  “And you wrote most of them during Christmas vacation.  Oh, Betty!  How splendid!” Then she looked at her curiously.  “How does it feel to be so successful at last, after being so bitterly disappointed?”

Betty, leaning forward against the desk, her chin in her hand, looked thoughtfully out of the window.  Then after a pause she answered, “Glad and thankful—­a deep quiet sort of gladness like a bottomless well, and a queer, uplifted buoyant feeling as if I had been given wings, and could attempt anything.  There’s nothing in the world,” she added slowly, as if talking to herself, “quite so sweet as the realization of one’s ambitions.  I was almost envious of Joyce when I saw her established in a studio, at last accomplishing the things she has always hoped to do.  And it was the same way when I saw Eugenia so radiantly happy in the realizing of her ambition, to make an ideal home for Stuart and her father and to be an ideal mother to little Patricia.  In their eyes she is not only a perfect house-keeper, but an adorable home-maker.