The summer over, Leslie had found time hanging heavily on her hands. She had had altogether too much time to think, and thinking grew into brooding over her deserved misfortunes. Strangely enough, she blamed Marjorie Dean more than all the others for what had happened. She chose to do so because she had never forgiven Marjorie for turning on her on the occasion when Leslie had led the verbal affront against Marjorie on the campus during the latter’s freshman year. With that for a basis, she had laid the failure of every dishonorable scheme she had concocted at Hamilton at Marjorie’s door. It was the old story of the injurer accusing the innocent injured party of treachery.
Shortly before her expulsion from Hamilton College, Leslie heard a rumor to which she paid no special attention on hearing. In the stress of the dismissal agony she forgot about it. Later it returned to her. It was the recollection of it which decided her to take up her residence in the town of Hamilton. She also had a certain amount of curiosity regarding what went on at Hamilton. Lola and Alida were still there. She had thought she might cultivate their society.
Leslie was shrewd enough to discern, that, while Lola Elster would gladly accept entertainment from her in New York, she was not desirous of the old campus intimacy with her.
Back in her roadster, having bade the two seniors a nonchalant farewell with, “I’ll lunch you at my aunt’s house some day soon,” she drove down the shady street half hurt, half amused.
“Lola’s the same greedy, grabbing kid,” she reflected. “That settles both of them for me. I couldn’t depend upon them to find out a thing for me. Bess Walbert is anything but trustworthy. Still I may have to make up with her yet.”
CHAPTER IX—CLEARING AWAY SNAGS
Marjorie had fully intended to fathom the mystery of the two freshmen’s apparent grudge against Jerry and herself without delay. Pressure of college affairs, social and scholastic, prevented the solving of the annoying problem. The return of the Silvertonites kept the Ten Travelers constantly traveling back and forth between Wayland and Silverton Halls. With the return of Phyllis Moore, the Moore Symphony Orchestra made itself heard about the campus on moonlight evenings. Almost every night for a week serenading went on.
During the days the two sets of girls took turns doing station duty. The freshman class was larger than ever before. One hundred and forty-three freshmen were registered. Every available room in the campus houses had been taken and a few boarding houses off the campus were well filled.
“It seems too bad we don’t know our own freshies as well as we know some of the others,” deplored Marjorie one evening about two weeks after the opening of college. “I have hardly seen those two girls, Miss Wilmot and Miss Robbins, since the morning Ronny and I talked to them on the campus. One can’t count seeing them at meals, because, then, they’re too far away to talk with. I went down to call on them twice. Once, they weren’t there, and the other time they had a ‘Busy’ sign up.”
“I haven’t been near them. I suppose I should have made a call, but I was anxious for you to break the ice. I am a timid little thing, you know,” Jerry ended with a chuckle.