"Just this afternoon. We're going back on the five forty-five, and catch the night express east. If you wait here, I'll chase after Stanley, 'cause he'll want to have lunch with the Diggs boy, and he can join us later."
Kit walked along the macadamized path which crossed the campus. It was bordered by dwarf evergreen, but the students had named it Hope's primrose path, owing to the temptation to dally along it, whenever one had the chance.
The coming of Billie unexpectedly, just at a time when she was feeling her first homesickness, struck Kit as being a special little gift handed out to her by Providence. But with only five hours to visit with him, she knew it would be all the harder after he had gone. He joined her on a run as she reached the sidewalk, and they hurried down to the Dean's just in time for luncheon. Kit's face was fairly radiant as she presented her old-time chum of the hills to Miss Daphne and the Dean.
"Don't you remember, Uncle Cassius," she asked eagerly, "how, when I first came, I told you all about the boy back home who would have just suited you? Well, that was Billie."
The Dean's gray eyes wrinkled as he surveyed Billie over the tops of his eye-glasses.
"You come highly recommended, young man," he said. "Kit almost persuaded me that if she didn't suit I might be able to coax you away from your grandfather."
"I'll bet you wouldn't change now," Billie responded, gallantly. "Kit knows a hundred per cent, more than I do, sir. I used to hate history until she took to telling me stories about it, and making it interesting. All I really care about is natural history, especially insects and birds."
"Well, you could have a lovely time studying over uncle's Egyptian scarabs," said Kit, placidly. "Weren't you telling me something about a place in China where they had a whole grove filled with sacred silkworms, Aunt Daphne?"
Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young face to the other. Never before had youth sat lunching at that table with her and her brother in quite such a radiant guise. The Dean usually took his noontide meal in absolute silence when they were alone together, as he held that desultory conversation disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit's coming, it had been impossible to check her flow of talk, until now the Dean actually missed it if she happened to be absent.