Anne was engrossed over a selection of patterns at the counter in the back of the store. She was to play Celia, and Norma was Rosalind. Charity always said that Norma's profile and long corn-colored hair brought her more undeserved honors than any qualities of excellence she possessed.

"I'm so glad you came along just now," sighed Anne. "Mother says I ought to dress very simply, but a Duke's daughter would have even a stuff dress cut in fashion, wouldn't she? Besides, I can show a lot of taste in my cap. Norma's got a perfectly wonderful cloak made of a dark green felt piano cover."

Kit helped her select a dull violet goods, with white underslip that showed through the slashes in the sleeves. Anne had been hovering over an old rose that absolutely killed any glint of color in her light brown hair.

"Never, never," warned Kit, "let old rose come near you, if you've got freckles or sandy hair. Don't you notice, Anne, how I cling to all the soft pastel nondescript tones? That's because my eldest sister is an artist, and we all have to live up to it more or less now. When Jean wants a new dress she slips away and communes with nature, until she's. .h.i.t the right tone values. You should have seen her face one day when some one asked Doris her favorite color, and she said, 'plaid.'"

"We're going to be late to rehearsal," Anne declared with a sigh, as they rose to leave.

"We are late now," rejoined Kit, cheerfully. "They'll prize us all the more if we keep ourselves kind of scarce. Rex told me to order walnut sundae for him, and wait until he comes back."

Just at this moment Anne laid her finger on her lips and glanced impressively at a table on the other side of the room. There sat Amy with Peggy Porter and Norma, all of them dreamily imbibing ice cream sodas, just as though Shakespearian rehearsals were occasions unknown in their engagement calendars.

Kit rose and crossed the room with caution until she stood behind Amy and intoned sepulchrally from Macbeth:

"What ho! Ye secret, black and midnight hags, what is't ye do?"

CHAPTER XVII

HOPE'S PRIMROSE PATH

"Well, we waited fifteen minutes for you," protested Amy, laughingly, "and Norma had to come down-town to try and find some high boots like Julia Marlowe wore for Rosalind. She's had that old picture of her pinned up on the wall for two weeks."

"Oh, and listen, Kit," Norma broke in; "you know that suede brown leather table cover of mine; I just took and slashed it around the edges and bent it over an old tam-o'-shanter crown and it looks exactly like the hat she wore. You know I've been considering rather seriously. Don't you really think that I'm peculiarly fitted for this sort of a career? Of course I'd only play Shakespearian parts, although I'd love to be Joan of Arc like Maude Adams was at Harvard, or play the old Greek tragedies at that Stadium place, somewhere in California. I've been studying Electra a little bit."

"Have you?" questioned Kit, kindly. "You dear child, you. So young and yet so aspiring. Finish your chocolate ice cream soda, and we'll run along.

Rex just came with his car and we can all pile into it."

The rehearsal pa.s.sed off splendidly, barring sundry interpolations by Kit into Orlando's flights of fancy.

"I think he would have had to have been much more interesting to have held the love of such a girl as Rosalind," she protested. "Heroes are awful people anyway, I think. The only ones I really like are explorers. Uncle Ca.s.sius said the other day that the most unique experience was to be the first white man to step foot on new territory. I may take up forestry as a profession, but I'd much rather be a woman explorer."

"Deserts, islands or mountain peaks?" queried Amy, as she dipped into her store of supplies under the couch for some hasty refreshments.

"Caves, I think," said Kit, darkly; "caves or islands. Don't give me anything to eat, 'cause I have to look up something in the library before I go home, and I'm late for lunch now."

"Just pimento cheese on crackers, and I've got some chocolate marshmallows here somewhere." Amy's voice was m.u.f.fled under the couch cover. But the clock on the mantel pointed at twelve-fifteen, and Kit knew the Dean's punctilious regard for keeping meal hours.

The library was unoccupied, apparently. Kit went over to the lower book shelves which contained the reference books on archaeology, dragging a low stool after her.

"A-men-o-taph," she said, under her breath. "Likewise Semele."

With the two volumes on her knees, she started to read up the references which the Dean wanted, when all at once she was conscious of some one who stood in the embrasured window at the west end of the room, looking at her. For a moment Kit was absolutely speechless, not believing the evidence of her own eyes. But the next moment Billie's own laugh, when he found out he had been discovered, startled her with its reality.

"Billie Ellis," she exclaimed, springing to her feet and scattering reference books and note paper helter-skelter. "How on earth did you ever get way out here?"

Billie shook hands with her, coloring boyishly, as he always did at any display of emotion, and trying to act as if it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for him to appear at Delphi, Wis., when he was supposed to be at Washington in school.

"We got our test exams last week, and Stanley had to run out to Minnesota for the government, so he took me along to help him."

"Billie, are you really after bugs and things--I mean, are you going to really be a naturalist?"

"I guess you'd kind of call it being a business naturalist," laughed Billie. "I don't think I'll ever live in a shack on a mountainside, and write beautiful things about them, now that I know Stanley. You want to roll up your sleeves and go to work like he does."

"Is he here, now?" asked Kit, eagerly.

"Yep." Billie nodded oat of the window, towards Kemp Hall, the boys'

dormitory. "After we found out that you didn't live here, we were going on down to the Dean's to find you, but he looked over the boys' freshman cla.s.s, and found he had a cousin or nephew or somebody on the list, Clayton Diggs."

"I know him," Kit exclaimed. "He's High Jinks' cousin. Regular bean pole, with freckles, but mighty nice. I've got to be back for lunch, and you're coming down with me, of course. How long can you stay?"

"Just this afternoon. We're going back on the five forty-five, and catch the night express east. If you wait here, I'll chase after Stanley, 'cause he'll want to have lunch with the Diggs boy, and he can join us later."

Kit walked along the macadamized path which crossed the campus. It was bordered by dwarf evergreen, but the students had named it Hope's primrose path, owing to the temptation to dally along it, whenever one had the chance.

The coming of Billie unexpectedly, just at a time when she was feeling her first homesickness, struck Kit as being a special little gift handed out to her by Providence. But with only five hours to visit with him, she knew it would be all the harder after he had gone. He joined her on a run as she reached the sidewalk, and they hurried down to the Dean's just in time for luncheon. Kit's face was fairly radiant as she presented her old-time chum of the hills to Miss Daphne and the Dean.

"Don't you remember, Uncle Ca.s.sius," she asked eagerly, "how, when I first came, I told you all about the boy back home who would have just suited you? Well, that was Billie."

The Dean's gray eyes wrinkled as he surveyed Billie over the tops of his eye-gla.s.ses.

"You come highly recommended, young man," he said. "Kit almost persuaded me that if she didn't suit I might be able to coax you away from your grandfather."

"I'll bet you wouldn't change now," Billie responded, gallantly. "Kit knows a hundred per cent, more than I do, sir. I used to hate history until she took to telling me stories about it, and making it interesting.

All I really care about is natural history, especially insects and birds."

"Well, you could have a lovely time studying over uncle's Egyptian scarabs," said Kit, placidly. "Weren't you telling me something about a place in China where they had a whole grove filled with sacred silkworms, Aunt Daphne?"

Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young face to the other.

Never before had youth sat lunching at that table with her and her brother in quite such a radiant guise. The Dean usually took his noontide meal in absolute silence when they were alone together, as he held that desultory conversation disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit's coming, it had been impossible to check her flow of talk, until now the Dean actually missed it if she happened to be absent.

CHAPTER XVIII

STANLEY APOLOGIZES

After lunch they all went into the library to look over the Dean's newly arrived treasures.

"Well, for pity's sakes," exclaimed Kit, as she stood before the plain, squat, terra-cotta urn, "is that the royal urn? I expected to see something enormous, like everything else that is wonderful and ancient in Egypt."

"Dear child," the Dean responded, happily, as he bent down to trace the curious, cuneiform markings which circled the urn. "This antedates the time of the Captivity and Moses. I cannot tell positively, until I have opened it and deciphered what I can of the papyrus rolls within. If it should go back to Moses, it will be wonderful. I cannot believe that it is contemporary with Nineveh. Daphne, you can recall how overjoyed I was when we unearthed that library of precious clay under the Nineveh mounds years ago. Think of reading something which was written by living man several thousand years before that."