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 any other group, unanimously welcoming this vivid, unusual girl. "You'll like your chapter here," Mrs. Fansler went on. "They're the finest girls in college, Alice Sothron and Myra Taine. . . . Myra lived with me her first year; and I know nearly all of them. I'll send word to Myra right away."

"Please don't!" Fidelia begged. She dropped her little sparkling sorority pin into the drawer of the dresser and she clasped Mrs. Fansler's thin wrist in her warm, caressing grasp.

Mrs. Fansler liked it and a flush of color spread under her pale skin. "Why not, child?" she protested. "When you went from Minnesota to Stanford, you went to the Tau Gamma girls there, didn't you?"

"Yes," Fidelia admitted.

"Then why don't you want to go to your girls here now?"

Fidelia did not immediately answer but Mrs. Fansler felt the grasp on her wrist tighten suddenly before Fidelia became conscious of it and took her hand away; and Mrs. Fansler's instinct much more definitely said: "She's got into some trouble at Minnesota but nothing serious. What really happened was after she shifted to Stanford, or later." Mrs. Fansler hungered to know; she yearned for the confidence of this vital, beautiful person for the maternal delight of counseling and protecting her.

"This is different," Fidelia replied, vaguely.

"How different, child?" Mrs. Fansler urged and she reviewed in her mind the note which had arrived for her the other day and which was the first herald of the coming of this girl to her house. She had thought