Kathleen raised herself to a sitting posture. Her eyes were very bright. There was no sign of tears in them. "Grace, can you ever forgive me for all the trouble I have caused you?" she asked solemnly.
"Of course I can, Kathleen," replied Grace, slipping down on the couch beside Kathleen and placing her arm about the slender shoulders of the newspaper girl. "You are not the only one at fault. I blame myself for a great many things that happened. If we had only known that you wished to be in the circus. We never thought of slighting you, Kathleen."
"I know it now," rejoined Kathleen sadly, "but I was furious with you at the time. Then, too, I had made up my mind not to like you. I thought you priggish and narrow-minded. I didn't understand college in the least. I was ready to ride over every Overton tradition for the sake of having my own way. Patience was the first to show me where I stood, and I tried to see matters from her standpoint. Then came the temptation to publish that 'Larry, the Locksmith' story, and you know the rest.
"Elfreda Briggs was the one who brought me to my first realization of college spirit. She had been watching me all year and discovered that I was unhappy. She marched into my room one night and found me crying. When she left me I was happier than I had been for months. She had shown me the way to atone for some of the mischief I had made. It was she who gave me the idea for the play. I had begun a play, then had destroyed it, resolving to have nothing more to do with the contest. After Elfreda and I had our talk I began again and I wrote 'Loyalheart.' After the Famous Fiction Dance Elfreda came to me again. She was determined to help me."
Grace's face grew radiant when Kathleen told of Elfreda's part in the affair. A great wave of love and tenderness for the one-time stout girl, who had begun her college life at such a disadvantage, swept over her. "Dear old J. Elfreda," she murmured. "What a wonder she is!"
"But there is one thing I haven't yet told you," said Kathleen. "You are to create the role of 'Loyalheart' in my play. You mustn't refuse. It was written for you, and no one else could possibly play it. Elfreda is going to arrange that part of it with the play committee. Please don't refuse. If you only knew how much it means to me." Kathleen's eyes were fixed appealingly upon Grace.
"I won't refuse," was Grace's gentle answer. "I'll do it just to please you and to cement our life-long friendship." The two girls had risen now, and stood facing each other. Then their hands met in a silent pledge of friendship that was to prove faithful to the end.
Loyalheart stepped into life on the fifth Friday evening after Easter and for two hours and a half her adoring audience of Overton students hung on her slightest word or gesture. From the moment in which Loyalheart left Haven Home on her Four Years' Pilgrimage she ceased to exist as Grace Harlowe, merging her personality entirely in that of the beautiful allegorical character she was portraying.
The play itself was in four acts, each representing one of the four college years. Written in the form of an allegory, it partook of the nature of a morality play and told the story of Loyalheart's eventful pilgrimage through the Land of College, accompanied by her faithful friends, Honor, Forbearance, Silence and Good Humor. Her heroic efforts to keep her four friends with her in spite of the plots of Snobbery, Gossip, Jealousy, Frivolity and Treachery, and her readiness to extend a helping hand to Diffidence, Poverty and Misunderstood, result in the creation of an illusive being known to her only as the Spirit, a white-robed apparition which visits her more frequently as she approaches the end of her pilgrimage. At the termination of Senior Lane, which is separated from the Highway of Life by the Gate of Commencement, the Spirit, clothed in glittering raiment, appears to Loyalheart, and she learns that in helping others and clinging to her ideals she has fostered and nurtured to radiant growth none other than the fabled College Spirit which she has ardently striven to recognize and possess.