"Oh!" exclaimed Marjorie, her eyes sparkling, "do you mean Miss Fielding?"
"Yes," returned Miss Flint. "We were best friends during our college days, too. Hampton College is our alma mater."
"That is where I hope to go when I finish high school. Miss Fielding has told me so many nice things about Hampton," was Marjorie's eager reply. Then she added impetuously, "I'm going to like Sanford, too. I'm quite sure of it."
"That is the right spirit in which to begin your work here," was the instant response. "I will assign you to that last seat in the third row. We do not change seats. Each girl is given her own place for the year."
Marjorie thanked Miss Flint, and made her way to the seat indicated. The sound of footsteps in the corridor had ceased. A tall girl in the front row of desks slipped from her seat and closed the door. Miss Flint rose, faced her class, and the recitation began.
After the class was dismissed Miss Flint detained Marjorie for a moment to ask a few questions regarding her text and note books. Muriel waited in the corridor. Her face wore an expression of extreme satisfaction. It looked as though the new freshman might be a distinct addition to the critical little company of girls who had set themselves as rulers and arbiters of the freshman class. She was pretty, wore lovely clothes, lived in a big house in a select neighborhood, had played center on a city basketball team, and was the friend of Miss Flint's friend. To be sure, Mignon La Salle might raise some objection to the newcomer. Mignon was so unreasonably jealous. But for all her money, Mignon must not be allowed always to have her own way. Muriel was sure the rest of the girls would be quite in favor of adding Marjorie Dean to their number. They needed one more girl to complete their sextette. To Marjorie should fall the honor.
"I'll introduce her to the girls this noon, and let them look her over. Then I'll have a talk with them to-night and see what they think," planned Muriel as she went back to the study hall at Marjorie's side.
There was a hurried exchange of books, then Marjorie was rushed off to her algebra recitation. Here she found herself at least two weeks ahead of the others, and was able to solve a problem at the blackboard that had puzzled several members of the class, thereby winning a reputation for herself as a mathematician to which it afterward proved anything but easy to live up to.
While in both her English and algebra classes Marjorie had searched the room with alert eyes for the girl who looked like Mary. She felt vaguely disappointed. She had hoped to come into closer contact with her. She liked Muriel, she decided, but she did not altogether understand her half-cordial, half-joking manner. She was rather glad that she was to go to her French class alone. She had told Muriel not to bother. She could find the classroom by herself.
As she clicked down the short, left-hand, third floor corridor, she saw just ahead of her a little blue-clad figure passing through the very doorway for which she was making. An instant and she too had entered the room. She stared about her, then walked to a seat directly opposite to the one now occupied by the girl that looked like Mary. For a brief moment the girl eyed Marjorie indifferently, then something in the scrutiny of the other girl evidently annoyed her. She drew her straight dark brows together in a displeased frown, and deliberately turned her face away.