It was a desolately unhappy Sally who began what she considered the unbearable task of living those two years which Courtney Barr had decreed should separate the orphan, Sally Ford, from the society debutante, Sally Barr. A dozen times, at least, during those first few weeks she would have run away, straight to David Nash, if she had not given her word of honor both to her mother and to her mother’s husband. But, almost insensibly, she began to enjoy life again. It was a soul-satisfying experience to have an apparently unlimited supply of spending money and the most beautiful wardrobe of any girl in the little Virginia city to which Courtney Barr had taken her. For many days almost every mail brought her a package from New York, addressed in Enid Barr’s surprisingly big handwriting. She and her mother wrote each other twice a week, and Enid early formed the habit of sending her a weekly budget of clippings from the papers about the social set in which the Barrs moved so brilliantly—“so you will become acquainted with the names of those who will be your friends,” as Enid wrote her daughter. Gradually the unreality of her new position and of her future expectations wore off and Sally came to regard herself as really the daughter of the Courtney Barrs. She lived for the rest of the summer with Courtney Barr’s third cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Barr, who were glad of both the money and the companionship which Sally brought them. To their friends the Charles Barrs explained that Sally was an orphaned cousin, and the story apparently was never questioned. She was accepted cordially by the carefree young people of the small city’s best social set, and was sometimes ashamed of the pleasure she had in being a popular, well-dressed, pretty young girl. She reproached herself for not mourning constantly for David, but she knew that not for an instant were her loyalty and love for him threatened by her strange new experiences. And, although she had given her promise not to write to David, she composed long, intimate letters to him every week, putting them away in her trunk in the confident belief that he would some day read them and love them, because she had written them. She told him everything in these letters she could not send—told him of the two or three nice boys who declared their puppy love for her; confessed, with tears that blistered the pages, that she had let one of them kiss her, because he seemed so hurt at her first refusal; described her new clothes with child-like enthusiasm; tucked snapshots of herself in the enchanting new dresses between the folded pages; in fact, poured out her heart to him far more unaffectedly than would have been possible if she had been mailing the letters. Not feeling at all that she was breaking her promise, she subscribed to The Capital City Press and to the college newspaper, avidly searching them for any news of David and jealously hoarding the clippings with which her diligence was rewarded.