After the Christmas holidays, the exciting and wonderful holidays, there seemed to be a great difference in Flip and her feeling towards the school. As she ran up the marble staircase she no longer felt new and strange. She realized with a little shock that she was now an "old girl." Almost every face she saw was familiar and the few new ones belonged to new girls who had replaced her as the lonely and the strange one. She stopped at the desk where Miss Tulip was presiding as she had on the day when Flip first came to the school with her father and Eunice. Miss Tulip checked her name in the big register and handed her a letter. It was from her father. "Oh, thanks, Miss Tulip," she cried, and slit it open. "My darling Flippet," she read, "I told you not to worry if you didn't hear from me for a week or so while I was traveling. I did get you off that one post card while I was in Paris having twenty-four hours of gayety with Eunice and now I am in Freiburg in Germany and will be traveling about for a month or so around here and across the border in Switzerland. It seems a shame that I will be so close to you and not be able to come to you at once, but I missed so much time while I was in the hospital with that devilish jaundice that I must work double time now to try to make up. However, I _think_ I may be able to manage to be with you for your ski meet. I shall try very hard to make it. I want to see you ski (but darling don't worry if you don't win any prizes. The fact that you have really learned to ski is more than enough) and I want to see your Paul. I don't know where I shall be during your Easter holidays but wherever it is I promise you that you will be there too and we'll sandwich in plenty of fun between sketches. And don't expect much in the way of correspondence from me for the next few months, my dearest. You'll know that I am thinking of you and loving you anyhow, but my work often makes me unhappy and tired and when I stop at night I fall into bed and it is a great comfort to me to know that you are warm and fed and well cared for and that you have learned to have fun and be happy. I know that it was difficult and I am very proud of my Flippet." With the letter he enclosed several sketches and Flip thought that Madame Perceval would have liked them--except the ones he had done of his twenty-four hours in Paris with Eunice. Flip crumpled the Paris sketches up but put the others carefully in the envelope with the letter, slipped it in her blazer pocket and started up the marble stairs just as a new group of girls came into the hall and started registering with Miss Tulip. On the landing she bumped into Signorina. "Have good holidays, Philippa?" the Italian teacher asked her. "Oh, yes, thank you, Signorina, wonderful! Did you?" "Lovely. But it is good to get back to our clean Switzerland. So we have lost our Madame Perceval. I shall miss her." "Yes," Flip said, "Yes, Signorina."