The house was one of the great square homesteads, built in the early days of the Commonwealth, and it stood in the morning sunshine just beyond the flickering shadows of the elm-trees in the street. It stood at a point where two ways met; and the south door opened on the wide road that led away to the hilly country beyond, and there were great elms there, too, to cast their shadows over porch and doorway when the room grew hot. A wonderful old grape-vine covered the porch, and there were lilac and locust-trees and rose-bushes by the white fence which enclosed a smooth green yard on three sides of the house. Beyond was a garden with fruit-trees and tall hollyhocks and great bunches of phlox, and a row of bee-hives facing the south; and that was all that Fidelia saw before she passed into the porch, to meet a kindly welcome. Only at the last moment had she accepted her friend's oft-repeated invitation to visit her in her home, and she had accepted for the same reason which had made her refuse it before. It was for the sake of Eunice. Fidelia had done well at the seminary during the summer term as far as study was concerned. She had done "splendidly," her classmates declared with admiring exaggeration; but all the same, she was beginning to think she had done foolishly--to say no worse. She had undertaken too much for her summer's work, and had been allowed to go on with it as perhaps no other girl there would have been allowed. Study seemed so easy to her, she was so ready and strong and cheerful, and altogether so sensible, that she had been left to pursue her own way with less close oversight as to health and strength than was usual at the seminary, and she had not proved herself worthy of being trusted in that direction. She had not needed to relight her lamp when the house was at last silent, nor to study by moonlight, but she had often stolen hours from her morning slumbers, and had carried her book to her walks and into her hours of recreation, and even into the morning and evening "half-hour" which is supposed by all concerned to be given to higher things. Of course she had overdone it, and had failed at last. Or she thought she had failed, because she had at last done wearily and with an effort what she might have done easily and with secret triumph if she had been strong and well, "with all her wits about her." She had not failed in the opinion of her classmates, or even of her teachers. She had at examinations done as well as the rest--better than most; but she had taken little pleasure in her success, and she was afraid of what Eunice might think of it all.