"You might endorse that 'Fair _versus_ March,'" replied Ravenel to his wife, one evening, as he lingered a moment at tea. She had playfully shown him the passage as a timorous hint at better self-care; but he smilingly rose and went out. She kept a bright face, and as she sat alone re-reading the letter, said, laughingly, "Poor John!" and a full minute afterward, without knowing it, sighed. This may have been due, in part at least, to the fact that Barbara's long but tardy letter was the first one Fannie had received from her. It told how a full correspondence between the writer's father and his fellow college president had made it perfectly comfortable for her to appear at the institution for the first time quite unescorted, having within the hour parted from Mr. and Mrs. Fair, who, though less than three hours' run from their own home, would have gone with her if she could have consented. She had known that the dormitories were full and that like many other students she would have to make her home with a private family, and had found it with three very lovable sisters, two spinsters and a widow, who turned out to be old friends--former intimates--of the Fairs. And now this intimacy had been revived; Mrs. Fair had already been to see them once, although to do so she had come up from Boston alone. How she had gone back the letter did not say. Fannie felt the omission. "I didn't think Barb would do me that way," she mused; and was no better pleased when she recalled a recent word of Jeff-Jack's: that few small things so sting a woman as to disappoint her fondness and her curiosity at the same time. Now with men--However! All Barbara had omitted was that Mrs. Fair had gone back with her son, who on his way homeward from a trip to New York had been "only too glad" to join her here, and spend two or three hours under spring skies and shingle roof with the three pleasant sisters. This was in the third of those six weeks during which Barbara had been at college. About half of the two or three hours was spent in a stroll along the windings of a small woodland river. The widow and Mrs. Fair led the van, the two spinsters were the main body, and Henry and Barbara straggled in the rear stooping side by side among white and blue violets, making perilous ventures for cowslips and maple blossoms, and commercing in sweet word-lore and dainty likes and dislikes. When the procession turned, the two stragglers took seats on a great bowlder round which the stream broke in rapids, Barbara gravely confessing to the spinsters, as they lingeringly passed, that she had never done so much walking in her life before as now and here in a place where an unprotected girl could hire four hacks for a dollar.