"Five nights now," Laura May explained. "Amelia was just sitting in the window Wednesday night playing and singing, and somebody answered her. Then they played and sang back and forth. We were awfully afraid the servants in the kitchen would hear it and report, but they didn't. It's been going on every night since. We're most afraid to go outside the house for fear he'll walk right up and speak." "He wouldn't know you." Amelia turned from the window to look scornfully at the sordid-souled Serena. "Not know me! Why, he'd feel that I was The One, the moment he saw me. It's like that when you love this way." She pillowed her chin on her arms again and stared sentimentally into the back yard. "Only this, only this, this, that once you loved me. Only this, I love you now, I love you now--I lo-o-ve you-u-u now." The song ended upon a high, quavering note just as the retiring bell clanged in the hall. The visiting girls waited a few moments, then reluctantly scrambled to their feet and started for their rooms. But Amelia still knelt by the window. "I'm positive he has raven black hair and an olive complexion," she said to Laura May as finally she drew the shade and began to get ready for bed. The next morning the Youngest Teacher took the girls for their after-breakfast walk. Trailing up and down the streets at the tail of the "crocodile" was one of the features of the boarding-school work which she particularly disliked; but, as a rule, the proceeding was commonplace enough. For a few mornings past Belinda had noticed something unusual about the morning expedition. She was used to chattering and giggling. She had learned that the passing of a good-looking young man touched off both the giggles and the chatter. She had even forced herself to watch the young man and see that no note found its way from his hand to that of one of the girls; but this new spirit was something she couldn't figure out. [Illustration: "For a few mornings past Belinda had noticed something unusual about the morning expedition"] In the first place the girls developed a mad passion for walking around the block. Formerly they had begged her to ramble to Fifth Avenue and to the Park. One saw more pedestrians on the avenue than elsewhere at that hour of the morning; and, if one walked to the Park, one might perchance be late for chapel and have to stay out in the hall until it was over. But now Fifth Avenue held no charms; the Park did not beckon. Round and round the home block the crocodile dragged its length, with Amelia and Laura May at its head and Belinda bringing up the rear. Men were leaving their homes on their way to business, and every time a young man made his appearance upon the steps of one of the houses on the circuit something like an electric shock ran along the school line and the crocodile quivered from head to tail.