And Molly flew away, happy as a bird that her writing was coming on, and that she felt at home again with the most interesting man she had ever met. CHAPTER IV.—A BARREL FROM HOME. Christmas was upon our girls almost before they had unpacked and settled down to work. Mid-year exams. had no terrors for our two post-graduates, but they were working just as hard as they ever had in their collegiate course. “I don’t know what it is that drives us so, Nance, unless it is that we are getting ready for the final examination at Judgment Day,” said Molly. “I am so interested, I never seem to get tired these days; and I don’t even mind the tutoring that has been thrust upon me. Now that I shall not have to teach for a living, I really believe I should not mind it very much.” Otoyo Sen was safely sailing under Molly’s tutelage through her senior year. She spoke the most correct and precise English unless she was embarrassed or upset in some way, and then, like Melissa Hathaway, she spoke from the heart, and little Otoyo’s heart seemed to beat in adverbs and participles. She and Melissa had struck up the closest friendship. “We might have known they would,” said the analytical Nance. “They are strangely alike to be so different.” “Now, Nance, how Bostonesque we are becoming! I have never asked a Bostonian a question that I have not been answered in this way, ‘It is and it isn’t,’” teased Molly. “Well, they are alike in being foreign, for Melissa is as foreign from us as is Otoyo. Then they are both scrupulously courteous until their amour propre is stepped on, and then you realize that they are both medieval. They are certainly alike in pride and in fortitude and perseverance and family feeling. You know perfectly well that the real Melissa that is so covered up by this educated Melissa would take a gun and shoot every living Sydney she could get at if her grandmother told her to! I hope to goodness modernism will never get to the old woman and she will learn that women can do anything men can, or she will make Melissa take the place of the sons she mourns. On the other hand, little Otoyo would commit hara-kiri without winking an eyelash if honorable-father told her to.” “You have so convinced me of their similarity that I see no room for difference. They will look to me exactly like twins after this,” laughed Molly; and both the girls could hardly restrain their merriment, for at that moment the so-called twins came in to call: Melissa, tall and stately as “the lonesome pine,” with all doubts as to her fine figure removed now, thanks to Nance’s skillful reformation of the blue homespun; and little Otoyo looking more like a mechanical toy than ever, since she had taken on a little more of the desirable flesh, according to the taste of her countrymen.