One dark late afternoon in early December, Sylvia waited alone in the candle-lighted shrine, neither Eleanor nor her hostess appearing. After five o'clock she started home alone along the heavily shaded paths of the campus, as dim as caves in the interval before the big, winking sputtering arc-lights were flashed on. She walked swiftly and lightly as was her well-trained habit, and before she knew it, was close upon a couple sauntering in very close proximity. With the surety of long practice Sylvia instantly diagnosed them as a college couple indulging in what was known euphemistically as "campus work," and prepared to pass them with the slight effect of scorn for philanderings which she always managed to throw into her high-held head and squarely swinging shoulders. But as she came up closer, walking noiselessly in the dusk, she recognized an eccentric, flame-colored plume just visible in the dim light, hanging down from the girl's hat--and stopped short, filled with a rush of very complicated feelings. The only flame-colored plume in La Chance was owned and worn by Eleanor Hubert, and if she were out sauntering amorously in the twilight, with whom could she be but Jerry Fiske,--and that meant--Sylvia's pangs of conscience about supplanting Eleanor were swept away by a flood of anger as at a defeat. She could not make out the girl's companion, beyond the fact that he was tall and wore a long, loose overcoat. Jerry was tall and wore a long, loose overcoat. Sylvia walked on, slowly now, thoroughly aroused, quite unaware of the inconsistency of her mental attitude. She felt a rising tide of heat. She had, she told herself, half a notion to step forward and announce her presence to the couple, whose pace as the Hubert house was approached became slower and slower. But then, as they stood for a moment at the entrance of the Hubert driveway, the arc-lights blazed up all over the campus at once and she saw two things: one was that Eleanor was walking very close to her companion, with her arm through his, and her little gloved fingers covered by his hand, and next that he was not Jerry Fiske at all, but the queer, countrified "freak" assistant in chemistry with whom Eleanor, since Jerry's defection, had more or less masked her abandonment. At the same moment the two started guiltily apart, and Sylvia halted, thinking they had discovered her. But it was Mrs. Hubert whom they had seen, advancing from the other direction, and making no pretense that she was not in search of an absent daughter. She bore down upon the couple, murmured a very brief greeting to the man, accompanied by a faint inclination of her well-hatted head, drew Eleanor's unresisting hand inside her arm, and walked her briskly into the house. CHAPTER XVII MRS. MARSHALL STICKS TO HER PRINCIPLES