"We must go straight down to the automobile and make her come back with us," was Grace's happy cry. "I am so anxious to explore our marvelous new possession. But we must have our Fairy Godmother with us. I can't really believe yet that anything so glorious has happened to ordinary me. It's more than a surprise. It's a positive miracle. My own beautiful House Behind the World! But I know an even better name for it. It's not one I thought of myself. That glory belongs to Kathleen West. You know, Tom, she once wrote an allegorical play. We produced it when I was in my senior year at Overton. I played the part of Loyalheart who leaves Haven Home to go into the Land of College. When first it began to dawn upon me that you meant this wonder to be my very own, it came to me like a flash that it was more than the House Behind the World. Don't you see, Tom? It's really and truly, Haven Home!"
CHAPTER III
FOR AULD LANG SYNE
"And so, having ended her pilgrimage through the Land of College, Loyalheart is going back to Haven Home," said Kathleen West softly.
"You're a very lucky Loyalheart," was J. Elfreda Briggs' brisk comment. "Not every one who goes adventuring into strange lands finds the home of her chee-ildhood an interesting place to settle down in. Now take Fairview, for instance. I wouldn't go trotting back there on a cut-rate excursion, let alone making a pilgrimage to the sacred, I mean scared, spot. That's the way it looks, you know; as though it had once tried to grow and then been frightened out of it. I never was so glad in all my life as when Pa said we'd kiss that town good-bye. I could see that I'd never make my everlasting fortune there as a lawyer."
"You mean lawyeress, according to the Dean vocabulary," reminded Arline Thayer with a giggle.
"What is life without Emma Dean?" smiled Anne Nesbit. "I wish she were here to-night."
"I wrote her, asking her to pay me a visit while you girls were here," stated Arline, "but she wrote back voluminous and ridiculous thanks and said the reunion was about as much as she could manage."
"That reminds me," broke in Elfreda, in business-like tones, "where are we going to hold the reunion this year and at what time? Not much of July is left us. August will scud by like a flash and then—Well, Grace can tell you why September won't be a strictly popular time for a reunion. Sara and Julia Emerson want us to have it at their camp in the Adirondacks. That's rather a long distance for Emma to come. You know she lives farther away than the rest of us. Why can't you come down to Wildwood again? I am nothing if not hospitable."