The girls of Elbridge Hall were not supposed to make the trip to New York by themselves; but sometimes a prudent senior--and who is prudent if not the chairman of the self-government committee?--might be put on the train at Elbridge by a teacher and sent off alone, on the telephoned promise of a parent to meet her on her arrival at the Grand Central. When, under the chaperonage of Jonesy, Lita stepped out of the school flivver at the station she saw that Doctor Dacer was there before her. He must have come up in a morning train, seen his patient and walked to the station. Wild possibilities rose at once in the girl's mind. Could he have known from Aurelia? Could he have arranged-- No, for he took no interest in her arrival; hardly glanced in her direction. He was smoking, and when the train came he got into the smoking car without so much as glancing back to see where Jonesy was bestowing Lita. The train, which was a slow one, was empty. Lita settled herself by a window and opened her geometry. She said to herself: "I simply will not sit and watch the door. If he means to come he'll come, and my watching won't change things one way or the other." She set her little jaw and turned to Monday's lesson: "To prove that similar triangles are to each other as the squares of the medians drawn to their homologous sides." The words conveyed absolutely nothing to her. She read them three times. It wasn't that she couldn't do the problem--she couldn't even think about it. She drew two similar triangles. They seemed to sit side by side like a cat and a kitten. She gave them whiskers and tails. Then, annoyed with herself, she produced a ruler and constructed a neat figure. She tried reading the theorem again, this time in a conversational tone, as if it were the beginning of a story: "Similar triangles are to each other--" The door opened, letting in the roar of the train and a disagreeable smell of coal smoke. "I will not look up," thought Lita; "I will not! I will not!" And raising her eyes she saw that Dacer was there. She smiled not so much in greeting as from pure joy. He hadn't wasted much time. He took her books and bag from the seat beside her and put them on the rack. Then he sat down and said, "Isn't it dangerous to let such little girls travel by themselves?" She found speech difficult between her heart's beating too fast and her breath's coming too slow, but she did manage to say, "What does Effie do?" "Just what you do--she expects me to be on hand to look out for her." "I didn't expect you." "No? Can it be you are not such a clever girl as teacher always thought?" "I thought you were spending the night at Elbridge." "So did I when I arrived, but my plans changed. I found that it would be better for me to take the three-o'clock to town and go back on Sunday afternoon, by the--what is the train that we take back on Sunday?"