“We have!” gulped Celia, plucking up a little courage.  “You know we have, Sallie.  That Mr. Gray told us to go back and milk the cows—­you know he did!”

Sallie, determined as she was, was softened by her mother’s letter.  She said:  “Well—­if they’ll have us back, I s’pose we might as well go.  But everybody will laugh at us, Celia.”

“Let ’em laugh!” cried her friend.  “They won’t laugh any harder than those folk in that studio did when we tried to act for the movies.”

Their experience searching for work at the film studios all over Chicago had taught the two country girls something, at least.  They had seen how poor people have to live in the city, and were going back to their country homes with an appreciation of how much better off they were there.

First, however, Nan forgot to buy her gloves; and instead took Sallie and Celia back to the Mason house with her.  When she explained the situation to Walter and sent him out to telegraph to Mr. Morton, the boy laughingly nick-named the big Mason home, “The Wayfarers’ Inn.”

“If you stayed here a month longer, Nan Sherwood, you’d have the house filled with waifs and strays,” he declared.

Sallie and Celia that evening divided interest with the masquerade party.  The next day at noon, however, the fathers of the two girls arrived and took them home.

The farmers were grateful—­loquaciously so on Mr. Si Snubbins’ part—­to Mr. and Mrs. Mason for housing the runaways over night; but neither could properly express the feeling he had for Nan Sherwood.

Mrs. Morton did that later in a letter, and Nan keeps that much-read letter to this very day in the secret box in which she locks her medal for bravery.  She thinks a great deal more of the letter from the grateful farmer’s wife than she does of the Society’s medal.

Before Nan Sherwood returned to Tillbury she saw Jennie Albert again, and finally made a special call upon Madam, the famous film actress, to beg that kind, if rather thoughtless, woman, to take the girl under her own special and powerful protection.

Inez went to Tillbury and Mrs. Sherwood welcomed the waif just as Nan knew she would.  While Nan was absent at school, her mother would have somebody to run errands and who would be cheerful company for her in “the little dwelling in amity.”

So we leave Nan Sherwood, looking toward her second term at Lakeview Hall, and about to renew her association with the girls and instructors there—­looking forward, likewise, to hard study, jolly times, and a broadening opportunity for kindly deeds and pleasant adventures in her school life.