she looked sweet, because she was sad and had made her face quite pale; but I was chiefly busy in thinking how to escape before anybody could talk to me.  It doesn’t seem safe nowadays to speak a word, because we don’t know where it will lead us.  Alice, too, looked pale, poor child! and kept glancing at me in a way that made me so sorry.  I wanted to tell her I didn’t care about her pranks and Billy’s, whatever they were.  And whatever she had written, it was sure to be clever.  The teacher says Alice has a positive genius for writing, and before many years she’ll be in all the magazines.  When supper was over I ran up-stairs to my room.  I sat down by the window in the dark and wondered when the moon would rise.  I felt excited—­as if something were going to happen.  And in spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to us, and might keep on happening, I felt as if I could die with joy.  There were steps on the porch below my window.  I heard father’s voice.

“That’s ridiculous, Elizabeth,” he said—­“ridiculous!  If it’s a good thing for other girls to go to college, it’s been a good thing for her.”

“Ah,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “but is it a good thing?”

Then I knew they were talking about me, and I put my fingers in my ears and said the Latin prepositions.  I have been talked about enough.  They may talk, but I won’t hear.  By-and-by I took my fingers out and listened.  They had gone in, and everything was still.  Then I began to think it over.  Was it a bad thing for me to go to college?  I’m different from what I was three years ago, but I should have been different if I’d stayed at home.  For one thing, I’m not so shy.  I remember the first day I came out of a class-room and Stillman Dane walked up to me and said; “So you’re Charlie Ned’s sister!” I couldn’t look at him.  I stood staring down at my note-book, and now I should say, quite calmly:  “Oh, you must be Mr. Dane?  I believe you teach psychology.”  But I stood and stared.  I believe I looked at my hands for a while and wished I hadn’t got ink on my forefinger—­and he had to say:  “I’m the psychology man.  Charlie Ned and I were college friends.  He wrote me about you.”  But though I didn’t look at him that first time, I thought he had the kindest voice that ever was—­except mother’s—­and perhaps that was why I selected psychology for my specialty.  I was afraid I might be stupid, and I knew he was kind.  And then came that happy time when I was getting acquainted with everybody, and Mr. Dane was always doing things for me.  “I’m awfully fond of Charlie Ned, you know,” he told me.  “You must let me take his place.”  Then Mr. Goward told me all those things at the dance, how he had found life a bitter waste, how he had been betrayed over and over by the vain and worldly, and how his heart was dead and nobody could bring it to life but me.  He said I was his fate and his guiding-star, and since love was a mutual flame that meant he was my fate, too.  But it seemed as if that were the beginning of all my bad luck, for about that time Stillman Dane was different, and one day he stopped me in the yard when I was going to chapel.