“I should be glad to gratify you,” said her preceptress, “but it is impossible.  Yours is the only vacancy on the second floor, and, as she is a delicate girl, I do not want to send her to the third.”

“Who is she?” Marie asked, seeing that she must yield to the inevitable.

“Her name is Esther Jones.  She is a very quiet little girl, inclined to be nervous.  I hope you will do all you can to make her happy and to keep her from being homesick.  She will come to-night.”

Marie was much vexed at the intrusion, as she chose to consider it.  It was so much nicer to room alone.

How provoking that just as she was “getting into” a better circle, and had succeeded in dropping her commonplace room-mate of last year, she should have this nervous little Esther Jones forced upon her.

The new girl was as plain as her name.  She wore a woolen dress, heavy shoes and an ordinary sailor hat.

“Very countrified,” was Marie’s mental verdict, as she watched her unpacking her trunk.

She did not offer to assist the little stranger, who seemed much in awe of her.

A new girl who enters a boarding-school a month after the term has begun is always to be pitied.

The other girls all have their homesickness over by that time, and are not apt to be so sympathetic with the newcomer as they would have been earlier.  They have formed their little coteries, and the new girl feels herself “outside.”

With Esther this was especially true.  Marie neglected her utterly, and she had not confidence in herself to try to make other friends.  She went about with a dejected, homesick look that moved Mrs. Hosmer’s heart.

“I must make some other arrangement after Christmas,” she thought.  “Esther doesn’t seem happy where she is.”

If she had known how much of Esther’s unhappiness was due to Marie’s unkindness, her indignation would have made itself felt.  Marie meantime poured forth her heart on cream note-paper to her friend Marguerite Archington, bewailing the cruel fate which separated them, and doomed her to the companionship of Esther Jones.

Esther’s natural timidity was increased by Marie’s treatment.  At first she made feeble efforts to converse, but finding herself continually repressed, gradually ceased from her endeavors to make friends with Marie.

Not only her timidity, but her nervousness, as well, grew on her.  She began to be startled at every sudden sound.

Now Marie was a girl without “nerves,” in the ordinary sense of the word, and could not understand or sympathize with those who are constituted differently.  She really believed poor Esther’s nervousness to be affectation, and had no patience with it.

“She’s been coddled all her life, evidently,” she reflected, “until now she expects every one to pet her on account of her foolish nervous tricks.  She needs a process of hardening.”