One morning she stepped to the desk when there were no other pupils near. “Mr. Miller,” she said, “I wonder if I may speak to you—alone—some time? Tonight, after school, perhaps? Just for a moment. I am in such trouble.” “Of course you may, Miss Carolyn,” said Mr. Miller, heartily. “I’ll be glad to help you if I can.” But Carolyn was not at school that afternoon. She called up the school by telephone at five after four, however, said that her mother had required her help that afternoon, and added that they all wanted Mr. Miller to come up for supper. “And I hope you will, for I do feel that you can help me. We can talk after supper.” “Sorry, but I have some work that is going to take my whole evening, Miss Carolyn. You can tell me about that matter at recess tomorrow. Please thank your mother for the invitation, and tell her how sorry I am I can’t come.” At recess the next morning, Carolyn said, when she was sure no prying boy lingered near: “Oh, Mr. Miller, I have been so worried lately I just couldn’t study. I have a dear friend at school, whom I’ve trusted and loved for two years more than anyone else. And now I find that she has deceived me, and it almost breaks my heart. It seems as if everything has just stopped, you know; life isn’t the same. What can one do? If one can’t trust one’s friends, what is there one can count upon?” She looked up at him with tears in her eyes, the lovely picture of disillusioned youth in its most appealing form. “I just had to talk to some one about it, and you’re the only person here who is—you know—like myself—who would understand.” Mr. Miller neither fell into this fair trap nor shied at it. He said, “Now, I’ll tell you just what I would do if I were you. You talk to your father. He knows all about people, and he’ll give you more good advice in a minute than I could in a year. If it were I, and a girl had treated me like that, I’d find a better chum and let her go, and not weep over it either. Just stop worrying about her. You can’t afford to lose out on your lessons for a snip of a girl who doesn’t know a good friend when she has one. Oh—you’ll excuse me, won’t you? I promised the boys to show them a new curve, and here they are for me.” And the cautious, sensible principal vanished out-of-doors. Carolyn, being really infatuated, made one more attempt. “I know you don’t like me,” she told the principal one day. “But why is it? What have I done, that you should hate me so? I have tried to get my lessons, and tried to be good in school; but you seem to hate the very sight of me.” “Now, that’s all nonsense,” Mr. Miller averred. “I like you just as well as anyone else in the room, and, so far as I know and intend, I treat you just as I do the others.”