Babcock gave a surprised and vacant laugh.

“Gosh!  I thought all you people were good friends!”

“Hazzard’s an ass,” observed Jim irritably.  “There are some things that aren’t any too becoming to college kids—­however, you can forgive them!  But when it comes to an ass like Hazzard chasing to every beauty show, and taking good little girls to supper—­”

“Alice don’t care a whoop what he does,” Babcock remarked hastily.

“Yes, so of course that makes everything all right,” Jim said ironically.  But Mr. Babcock was in no mood to be critical of tones.

“Sure it does!” he agreed contentedly.  And when Jim had disgustedly departed, he remained still staring into the fire, a pleased smile upon his face.

Julia spent the next day in bed fighting a threatened nervous breakdown, and Jim came to see her at two o’clock, and they had a long and memorable talk, with Jim’s chair drawn close to the couch, and the girl’s lax hand in his own.  She had not slept all night, she told him, and he suspected that she had spent much of the long vigil in tears.  Tears came again as she begged a hundred times to set him free, but he quieted her at last, and the old tragedy that had risen to haunt them was laid.  And if Julia felt a rush of blind gratitude and hope when they sealed their new compact with a kiss, Jim was no less happy—­everything had come out wonderfully, and he loved Julia not less, but more than he had ever loved her.  The facts of her life, whatever they had been, had made her what she was; now let them all be forgotten.

“Still, you are not sorry I told you, Jim?” Julia asked.

“No, oh, no, dearest!  If only because you would have been sure to want to do it sooner or later—­it would have worried you.  But now I do know, Julie, you little Spartan!  And this ends it.  We’ll never speak of it again, and we’ll never think of it again.  You and I are the only two who know—­And we love each other.  When all’s said and done, it’s I that am not good enough for you, darling, not worthy to tie your little shoe laces!”

“Oh, you!” Julia said, in great content.

The rest followed, as Julia herself said, like “a house-maid’s dream.”  Jim went home to tell his own people that night, and the very next morning Julia, surprised and smiling, took in at the door a trim little package that proved to be a blue-and-white Copenhagen teacup, with a card that bore only the words “Miss Barbara Lowe Toland.”  Julia twisted it in her fingers with a curious little thrill at the heart.  The “nicest” people sent cups to engaged girls, the “nicest” people sent their cards innocent of scribbled messages.  She, Julia Page, was one of the “nicest” people now, and these were the first tentacles of her new estate reaching out to meet her.

Notes and flowers from the Tolands and the warm-hearted Tolands themselves followed thick and fast, and in a day or two notes and cups—­cups—­cups—­were coming from other people as well.  The Misses Saunders, the Harvey Brocks, the George Chickerings, Mr. Peter Coleman, Mr. Jerome Phillips, Mrs. Arnold Keith, and Miss Mary Peacock—­all had found time to go into Nathan Dohrmann’s, or Gump’s, or the White House, and pick out a beautiful cup to send Miss Julia Page.