“I can’t see how you can joke about it,” whimpered Sally, bruising her fingers with a jerk at too strong a piece of bundle cord.  “Really, Bobbie, if I ever dreamed it would be as hard as this to go, I don’t believe anything would have induced me to come.”  She bit her bruised finger as well as her trembling lip.

“You don’t mean that, Kitten,” drawled the indifferent Bobbie, who had agreed to help pack, although she much preferred “firing things in trunks” and utilizing packing time out of doors.  “You would never have known the fun we have had here, if you hadn’t come, and isn’t it heaps better to pay now than never to have known it?”

“Nothing seems better now—­everything is worse, coal black, pitch dark, bitter, worse,” snapped the usually complaisant Sally.

“If I had your talent, wild horses couldn’t drag me from Wellington,” said Bobbie seriously.  “And I do hope, little Kitten, that I am not wholly to blame for your unhappy predicament,” her voice dropped to seriousness.

“Now, Bobbie,” and the good-natured little Sally smiled through, “never forget that you really made it possible for me to come here, and that you—­”

“Now, that’s enough, Kitten.  If you start going back we shall find ourselves in each other’s arms with awfully red eyes—­first thing you know.  I still think the miracle will save you, but poor me!” and she affected a most juvenile boohoo.  “I am surely doomed.”

“Why don’t you try it, Bobbie?  You might get through—­”

“Not in a thousand years.  And suppose I did, where would it land me?”

“In your proper place, in class, of course.”

“And have every one know—­I couldn’t, Kitten.  I talk bravely, but I’m a rank coward at heart.  There, the boxes are tied, I hope to your satisfaction, and it’s sweet of you to do the tags.  No one would be able to read the addresses if I wrote them.  Oh, me, oh, my! somehow today reminds me of old Polly Jenkins’ funeral.  Her abandoned bedroom looked just about like this,” surveying the disorder of the little room under the eaves.

“Well, you run along and attend to the outside errands; I must hide the evidences of our flight,” said Sally, with something between a laugh and a sigh.  “You may pay all my bills, just say we want to settle things so we can run off home when the holiday is proclaimed, then, if you don’t mind, just hand this music to Dolly Lloyd.”

“Couldn’t I kiss a few of the girls for you so as to save time later?” asked Bobbie in naive sarcasm.  “I am so sentimental today I could hug the very old trees, I do believe.  All right, little sister, I’ll go out and do the financial chores, but my head and my heart are still at the dance,” and she hummed herself out with a feeble dance step—­to do the aforesaid chores.

Left alone the blonde little freshman dropped her hands in her lap and ceased her nervous activity.