KATHARINE HOLLAND was distinctly unpopular during her first weeks in the Ryder School. Miss Lucilla Ryder treated her courteously, but Miss Lucilla's courtesy had a frappé quality not conducive to heart expansion. Miss Emmeline showed even more than her usual gentle propitiatory kindliness toward the quiet, unresponsive girl, but kindliness from Miss Emmeline had the flavour of overtures from a faded daguerreotype or a sweetly smiling porcelain miniature. It was a slightly vague, impersonal, watery kindliness not calculated to draw a shy or sensitive girl from her reserve. The teachers, all save Belinda, voted Katharine difficult and unimpressionable. As for the girls, having tried the new pupil in the schoolgirl balance, and having found her lamentably wanting in appreciation of their friendliness, they promptly voted her "snippy," and vowed that she might mope as much as she pleased for all they cared--but that was before they knew that she was a "Blighted Being." The moment that the cause of Katharine's entrance into the school fold and of her listless melancholy was revealed to her schoolfellows, public opinion turned a double back-somersault and the girl became the centre of school interest. Her schoolmates watched her every move, hung upon her every word, humbly accepted any smallest crumbs of attention or comradeship she vouchsafed to them. No one dared hint at a knowledge of her secret, but in each breast was nursed the hope that some day the heroine of romance might throw herself upon that breast and confide the story of her woes. Meanwhile, it was much to lavish unspoken sympathy upon her and live in an atmosphere freighted with romance. Amelia Bowers was the lucky mortal who first learned the new girl's story and had the rapture of telling it under solemn pledge of secrecy to each of the other girls. Sentiment gravitates naturally toward Amelia. She is all heart. Possibly it would be more accurate to say she is all heart and imagination; and if a sentimental confidence, tale, or situation drifts within her aura it invariably seeks her out. Upon this occasion the second-floor maid was the intermediary through which the romantic tale flowed. She had been dusting the study while Miss Lucilla and Miss Emmeline discussed the problem of Katharine Holland, and happening to be close to the door--Norah emphasised the accidental nature of the location--she had overheard the whole story. Norah herself had loved, early and often. Her heart swelled with sympathy, and she sped to Amelia, in whom she had discovered a kindred and emotional soul. Fifteen minutes later Amelia, in one of her many wrappers, and with but one side of her hair done up in kids, burst in upon Laura May Lee and Kittie Dayton, who were leisurely preparing for bed. Excitement was written large upon the visitor's pink and white face. She swelled proudly with the importance of a bearer of great tidings. "Girls, what do you think?" She paused dramatically.