"I am sorry. It was terribly stupid of me. I was sure the girls were in another scrape, and when the car stuck on them had got a ride back to school. It was a terrible blunder." "I am glad of it now, because it brought you to visit me." And he seemed in not the least bit of hurry, but settled back and talked, and he had a wonderful basket of fruit, apples and grapes and golden pears, and he hoped Doris would accept them in token of forgiveness. "But when you tell your father, will he ask who brought them?" "I shall just say the Curious Cat brought them to apologize--and father is not a bit inquisitive. He will think it is quite all right--he has the dearest way of thinking things are quite all right." Doris did long to know how old he was--of course she could not ask--he surely was not nearly so old as father, yet he did not look young. The college men of Rosalie's favor looked like children beside him. And he talked like a man who knew things. But he could not be old--he laughed so readily, and teased so constantly, and his eyes were so friendly and warm. Father was forty-three, and forty-three is very terribly old when one is twenty. They had tea together--on the Endeavor china. He was much more fun than the bishop. And in spite of the very-close-to-gray-hairs at his temples, he had a dear boyish way of settling back in a chair and getting himself comfortable and happy. And when you see another thoroughly comfortable and happy right at your side, you are bound to feel the same way yourself. And Doris did. After she had watched his departure from the shelter of the front window, she came back into the room, and there on the card tray--how in the world it got there she could not imagine--but she knew instantly it was his card--and she pounced upon it eagerly. "Mr. Daniel Amberton MacCammon." After all, the name meant nothing. And there was so much she wished to know. His age, and who he was, and why he came there, and what in the world he was doing in the Haunted House, and--oh, a thousand things. But Doris looked at the card in a friendly companionable way, and said, in her softest and chummiest voice: "Honestly, I like you." CHAPTER XI THE PHILOSOPHER "Now, Doris," began Rosalie briskly, "you must help decide my life career. They gave us a fine talk at chapel this morning, urging us to spot our high ambitions for guiding stars to work toward. Of course, we can change our minds later on if we like, we are not to be irrevocably bound to what we say, but no student 'can plan most wisely and most surely for the future, without a pole star ever shining in his mind's eye,'" she quoted patly. "Now, what are my ambitions?" "Mercy, Rosalie, you know your ambitions better than I do," said Doris, as earnestly as though the same subject had not been discussed regularly ever since Rosalie was a freshman.