As Beverly sat in her nook watching the little girls of the primary grades run out to their playground at the rear of the building, the old girls of the upper classes pair off and stroll away through the extensive grounds, and the new ones drift thither and yonder like rudderless craft, she saw two girls come from Miss Woodhull's office. One was a trifle shorter than Beverly and plump as a woodcock. She was not pretty but piquant, with a pair of hazel eyes that crinkled at the corners, a saucy pug nose, a mouth like a Cupid's bow and a mop of the curliest red-brown hair Beverly had ever seen. Her companion was tall, slight, graceful, distinguished. A little aristocrat from the top of her raven black hair to the tips of her daintily shod feet was Aileen Norman and though only sixteen, she was the one girl in the school who could hold Miss Woodhull within the limits of absolute courtesy under _all_ circumstances. Although descended from New England's finest stock, Miss Woodhull also possessed her full share of the New Englander's nervous irritability which all the good breeding and discipline ever brought to bear can never wholly eradicate. Her sarcasm and irony had caused more than one girl's cheeks to grow crimson and her blood to boil under their stinging injustice, for Miss Woodhull did not invariably get to the root of things. She was a trifle superior to minor details. But Aileen possessed an armor to combat just such a temperament and her companion, Sally Conant's wits were sharp enough to get out of most of the scrapes into which she led her friend. So the pair were a very fair foil to each other and a match for Miss Woodhull. What their ability would prove augmented by Beverly's characteristics we will learn later. As they came down the steps from Miss Woodhull's office, said office, by-the-by, being in the wing in which the recitation rooms were situated and quite separate from the main building, Sally's eyes were snapping, and her head wagging ominously; Aileen's cheeks were even a deeper tint than they ordinarily were, and her head was held a little higher. Evidently something of a disturbing nature had taken place. They did not see Beverly in her bosky nook and she did not feel called upon to reveal herself to them. "It was all very well to stick _three_ of us together when we were freshmen and sophomores, but juniors deserve _some_ consideration I think. If Peggy Westfield had come back this year it would have been all well and good, but to put a perfect stranger in that room is a pure and simple outrage. Why we haven't even an idea what she's like, or whether she'll be congenial, or nice, or--or--anything. Why couldn't she have given us one of the girls we know?" stormed Sally.