He strove for answer, but the young woman's nod was positive. It sent him to the mess hall, while she hurried along the corridor, hurried to avoid the crowd that would soon be abroad. So she had been trained, and such was second nature. She was not afraid of any student or of all of them. She had had delightful friends among them. But she was not a students' belle; her dear father's abhorrence of such had kept her unscathed. She lived among them, but the traditions of her household kept her apart. She was motherless, but her mother's influence had set her feet in the path of freedom and her father saw to it that they kept their way. In all the gay students' life that surged about her she was somehow untouched. She was keenly alive to its phases, to all the life as a whole, but not to any unit forming it. She saw the belles of the season come and go at Christmas, at Easter, or the Finals, without the least desire to outshine them, or shine with them; yet it would have been easy enough had she wished it. Had she social aspirations she would find many matrons in the professors' homes to chaperon her; had she been sentimental she could have made many a bosom friend in the young girls of the town; had she been trained otherwise, her record from her first long skirt might have been one of reckless flirtations--for there is no limit to a student's daring--but as it was, she lived among them quite simply. She ordered her father's house; she read, few knew how deeply; she rode, she drove, and went her own way happily. One lesson she had at heart. She took the young men about her without an atom of seriousness. It was this which nettled Frank Lawson. His attentions had been taken quite seriously usually, too seriously once, he might have remembered. It aroused his insistence; it sent him loitering by the gate to the grounds when Frances came driving down the ribbony road winding outwards. "I think you might take me," he declared, as she drove slowly by. "Jump in!" Frances pulled the horse around and left the wheels towards him hospitably opened. Lawson thought of the beauty he had driven the afternoon before, of the roses on her breast for which she had thanked him so graciously, of the shining skins of his horses and the glittering wheels of his carriage, and he set his teeth; but he climbed up into the trap and sat down by Frances' side. She did not offer him the reins, and he hated being driven by a woman. "You know most of the roads about here?" The young man assented. "Out towards Monticello and down beyond the University and Park Street; but you don't know this."