“Let me see ’em, quick! Oh, I want to wear--” Some one was knocking insistently at the door, and Anne, springing up belatedly to answer, was drawn mysteriously into the hall. “I really can’t,” Raquel could hear the answer. “No, well, I’m sorry, Lois, but if you can’t, I can’t.” “Do you mean to say,” came in audible exasperation from the other side of the door, “that you won’t go anywhere without--” The door was quickly and decisively closed. Anne came back in a few moments with an elaborate air of unconcern, but the magic spell was broken. Raquel had relapsed into the subdued, colorless, and somewhat stiff young person who took her seat each day at the table with the throng of careless, happy, moody, flippant, serious, generous, and thoughtless girls at The Towers. * * * * * Autumn flew by. The red haze of autumnal sunsets deepened, and each night the red haze of war, the Great War, spread further over the country, until at last it colored even the atmosphere of the schools, including that of The Towers School for Girls. “Barry has enlisted with the French flying corps,” Anne announced one afternoon as Raquel came in to find her tearful but proud, a letter from home in her hand. To youth, there was thrilling excitement in the Great Adventure. It did not loom with the deadly portent which weighted the spirits of their elders. Somehow it could not touch them with its lean and cruel finger, or had not, as yet. There was a rush of gayeties, a feverish busyness, those days; innumerable parties planned to cheer the boys, to keep up their “morale.” Even the school girl was called upon to do her bit. The girls at The Towers were to take charge of the booths at a Red Cross benefit fair to be held in the near-by village. Nearly all the older girls had been invited to a party and a dance to be given afterward for the lads about to sail for France. Raquel had never yet been included in those little gayeties given surreptitiously in one girl’s room or another’s; she never seemed to be gathered into those little chatting bevies that foregather in a corner. And so far she had not been asked to take any part in preparations for the fair. The older girls had been organized into committees of arrangements. Would they have her sell something, Raquel wondered. Shyness, partly, and partly the consciousness of that first snub, had held her aloof ever since her coming to The Towers. Raquel was not in the least selfconscious, but instinctively she drew herself into a shell of silence, and like the plants of her own desert, thrust out little thorny spikes that said “Keep off” just as effectively as if the words had been visible.