A sense of hurt at his neglect did not grow less when she learned from old Jonathan, after one or two questions, that he had gone over to Plattsburg; rather it gave way to a resentment that Peter, considering what good chums they had grown to be and the "school" and everything, should have gone off on any such trip without one word of parting! "He'll see how well we can get along without him," she had declared to herself after the third day. After all he probably _was_ hiding something; this sudden disappearance must have some connection with it. His comradeship had grown very pleasant, she admitted, but, she told herself, it belonged to the real Anne Leavitt, like Aunt Milly and Nonie and the others, he must drop out of her life when she left Happy House. So that he might not even be missed by Davy and his cronies, Nancy devoted one entire afternoon to teaching the boys of the club how to build a fire without matches. When, after repeated and discouraging failures, the last one had joyfully succeeded, Nancy had promised to teach them to wig-wag at the very next meeting. When Nancy returned to the house, flushed and tired from the hours on the beach, old Jonathan, at the door, presented her with a half-blown rose, its stem thrust through a folded sheet of paper. "Mr. Peter, over to Judson's, asked me to give it t'you." With a certain set of the college men and girls Nancy had been very popular; more than once pretty tributes of flowers had come to her. She had accepted them rather indifferently, had kept them with dutiful care in water and had pasted the cards that had come with them in her remembrance book. But this gift was different; it was quaint--and _so_ pretty! "If you will meet me at seven in the orchard I will tell you a surprise that will tickle you to pieces," Peter Hyde had scrawled across the paper. "How--_funny_!" laughed Nancy, reading and re-reading the lines. "What can it be?" If Nancy had asked herself why she sang as she dressed for supper she would have thought, truthfully, that it _was_ because she was ravenously hungry and B'lindy's supper smelled very good; and she chose to wear, from her slender wardrobe, a pink organdy, because it would be cool--_not_ that she even dreamed, for a moment, of doing such a silly thing as going to the orchard at seven o'clock, to meet Peter Hyde! A dozen times, during the evening meal, she resolved that Peter Hyde's surprise could wait. He presumed, indeed, to think that, after he had absented himself for so long without one little word of explanation, she would go running at the crook of his little finger! However, she put the pink rose in her belt and occasionally slipped it out to smell of it. It was the most beautiful rose she had ever seen--she must ask Jonathan its variety.