There was a moment of silence, and then Betty rose to go. “I have to pack and I know you are busy. Miss Ferris, I’m going to be at the Belden next year.”
“I’m sorry you’re not coming here,” said Miss Ferris kindly. “Couldn’t you manage it?”
“Yes, but the–the orange seems to cut better the other way,” said Betty. “That isn’t a good figure, but perhaps you can see what it means.”
It was worth most of what it had cost to see Helen’s face when she heard the news. “Oh Betty, it’s too good to be true,” she cried, “but are you sure you want me?”
“Haven’t I given up the Hilton to be with you?” said Betty, with her face turned the other way.
Alice was disappointed, but she would be just as happy with Constance Fayles. She found more “queer” things to like at Harding every day, and she considered Betty Wales one of the queerest and one of the nicest.
Eleanor pleased Betty by offering no objection to the change of plan. “Only you needn’t think that you can get rid of me as easily as all this,” she said. “I shall camp down in the registrar’s office until she says that ‘under the circumstances,’ which is her pet phrase, she will let me change my application to the Belden. By the way, Betty, Jean Eastman wants to see you after chapel to-morrow. She said she’d be in number five.”
After “last chapel,” with its farewell greetings, that for all but the seniors invariably ended with a cheerful “See you next September,” and the interview with Jean, in which the class president offered rather unintelligible apologies for “the stupid misunderstanding that we all got into,” Betty went back to the house to get her bags and meet Katherine, who was going on the same train. Some of the girls had already gone, and none of them were in but Rachel, who was perched in a front window watching anxiously for a dilatory expressman, and Katherine, who was frantically stowing the things that would not go in her trunk into an already well-filled suit-case.
“Well, it’s all over,” said Betty, sitting down on the window seat beside Rachel.