"By Jove, but that was like old 'Bee-trice' to send me down here into a hornet's nest," he thought. "I'll have to get square with them somehow before the lecture or it will never come off. I assure you I didn't know anything about the article," he said aloud to Judy. "I only came to accommodate Miss Slammer. She told me yesterday at the office she was ill." "Then you aren't a lecturer or a writer?" broke in Judy. "Miss Slammer and I work on the same paper. Didn't she say that in the letter?" Judy shook her head. "I'm afraid you'll think I'm an impostor, Miss Kean, but I had no intention of sailing under false colors. I think I'd better take the next train back to New York and give up the lecture. It would be better to run away before I'm frozen out, don't you think so?" Judy was silent for a moment. Her rage against Mr. James Lufton had entirely disappeared and she again had that feeling that she would like to protect him from the wrath to come. "What is a 'polite freeze-out' exactly?" Jimmy asked. "Well, while you lecture, you are to look into rows of stony faces and when you finish, there is not to be a word spoken, not a single handclap, nothing but stillness as the girls file out of the hall." Jimmy laughed. "A sort of glacial exit, I suppose. It makes me chilly to think of it. Miss Slammer had a lucky escape." They were paddling now in the very center of the upper lake, but so absorbed were they in their conversation that they had scarcely noticed a canoe in front of them. Suddenly there came a cry, a splash and then a moment of perfect stillness followed by a confused sound of voices from the shore. The next instant Judy saw in front of them an upturned canoe and two heads just rising above the water. Before she had time to realize the danger, Jimmy Lufton had torn off his coat, flung his hat into the bottom of the canoe and, with a carefully planned leap, had cleared the side of the canoe, sending it spinning over the water, shaking and quivering like a frightened animal. And now Judy beheld him swimming with long strokes toward the place where the two heads had appeared, disappeared and once more reappeared. In that flash of a moment she had recognized the blonde plaits of Margaret Wakefield and the wet curls of Jessie Lynch. As she mechanically paddled toward the struggling figures, she remembered that Jessie could not swim a stroke and that Margaret could only swim under the most favorable circumstances in a shallow tank. [Illustration: Before she had time to realize the danger, Jimmy Lufton had torn off his coat.--_Page_ 132.] "He can't hold them both up at once," thought Judy, with a throb of fear as she frantically beat the water with her paddle in her effort to reach them. For a moment Jimmy himself was in a quandary. It looked as if he would have to let one girl go to save the other, when he saw one of the canoe paddles floating within reach. He gave it a swift push toward the struggling Margaret.