After the first week of school the girls and boys settled down to what Graham called "digging." Geometry looked less formidable to Jerry, Cicero was like a beautiful old friend, Gyp was with her in English and history, Ginny Cox was in one of her classes, too, and Jerry liked her better each day. Patricia Everett was teaching her to play tennis until basketball practice began. There were the pleasant walks to and from school through the city streets, whose teeming life never failed to fascinate Jerry; the jolly recess, breaking the school session, when the girls gathered around the long tables and ate their lunch; and then the afternoon's play on the athletic field at Highacres. Had old Peter Westley ever pictured, as he sat alone in his great empty house, how Highacres would look after scores of young feet had trampled over its velvety stretches? Perhaps he had liked that picture; perhaps, to him, his halls were echoing even then to the hum of young voices; perhaps he had felt that these young lives that would pass over the threshold of the house he had built out into the world of men and women would belong, in some way, to him who had never had a boy or girl. One afternoon Gyp and Jerry lingered in the school building to prepare a history lesson from references they had to find in the library. Gyp hated to study; the drowsy stillness of the room was broken by the pleasant shouting from the playground outside. She threw down her pencil and stretched her long arms. "Oh, goodness, Jerry--let's stop. We can ask mother all these things." Jerry was quite willing to be tempted. She, too, had found it hard to hold her attention to the Thirty-one Dynasties. Gyp leaned toward her. "I'll tell you--let's go exploring. There are all the rooms in the back we've never seen." During the past six months workmen had been rebuilding the rear wing of Highacres into laboratories. The changes had not been completed. Gyp and Jerry climbed over materials and tools and little piles of rubbish, poking inquisitive noses into every corner. Now and then Gyp stopped to ask a workman a few questions. They stumbled around in the basement where in a few weeks there would be a very complete machine-shop and carpentry room. Then they found a stairway that led to the upper floors and scampered up it. "Oh, Jerry Travis, I _wish_ you could see yourself," laughed Gyp as they paused on the third floor. "Your face is dirty, too," Jerry retorted. "Isn't this fun? It doesn't seem a bit like school, does it? I wonder if they're ever going to use these rooms. Let's play hide-and-seek. I'll blind and count twenty and you hide and we mustn't make a _sound_!" which, you know, is a very hard thing to do when one is playing hide-and-seek.