“Just wait a minute, girls,” she said. “Mary, I want to call a meeting of ‘The Merry Hearts.’”
“All right,” said Mary, taking her place under the gate lantern. “It’s called. What is the business?”
Eleanor had drawn off to one side, uncertain whether it would be more tactful to go or stay.
“Just to elect Eleanor Watson a member,” announced Bob, calmly. “Don’t go, Eleanor. I’ve sounded them all, and they all want you. This is only a formality.”
The formality was quickly disposed of after the very informal fashion of the society, and Eleanor found herself wearing Babe’s cherished pin and having the objects and rules of the society explained to her by Babbie Hildreth and Nita Reese, who had been her most implacable critics.
“Yes, we changed our minds,” Bob was meanwhile explaining to Madeline, whom she had pulled back to a safe distance for confidences. “We felt pretty mean the night of the prom., and to-day I told Babe that anybody who was generous enough, after everything, to give Helen Chase Adams a spread, and brave enough to face it out down there at Cuyler’s,—well, that for all that she deserved something in place of what she didn’t get. I hope she was pleased.”
Alone in her room a little later Eleanor caught sight of her happy face in a mirror, and laughed at herself for being so absurdly pleased about such a little thing. “But after all it isn’t such a very little thing,” she reflected. “It means that they’re beginning to trust me again, and that’s at the bottom of everything.”
But the happiest person in Harding College that night was Betty Wales.
“Everything is getting fixed,” she told the green lizard joyously. “Eleanor is a ‘Merry Heart’ and Helen is an editor. It does seem as if there was nothing more left to bother about.” The ten o’clock gong sounded ominously through the halls and Betty jumped for her light. “There is always the ten o’clock rule,” she sighed, and then she laughed. “I wouldn’t bother about things for anything,” she said as she tumbled wearily into bed.