"Don't go for a second, Anthony," she called after him. "I wanted to tell you that you are living in a house with a haunted chamber. At least I don't know whether this room is exactly haunted, but there is something queer about it that my mother and brother have never confided to me. Perhaps I shall move in and find out for myself what it is. I will if there is a chance of my friends, Esther Crippen and Polly O'Neill, coming home for the holidays. For it is so big that we could stay in it together. And perhaps Mrs. O'Neill will let Polly come here and visit me for a little while. Both the girls are doing wonderful things in New York City. And I am afraid if they don't come home pretty soon they will both have outgrown me. It is so horrid to be a perfectly ordinary person." As Betty moved off, the expression on her companion's face did not suggest that he thought of her as entirely ordinary. CHAPTER IV TEMPTATION "You are perfectly absurd and I haven't the faintest intention of confiding in any one of you." And Polly O'Neill, with her cheeks flaming, rushed away from a group of girls and into her own bedroom, closing the door and locking it behind her. This winter at boarding school in New York City had not been in the least what she had anticipated. Perhaps the character of the school she and her mother had chosen had been unfortunate. Yet they had selected it with the greatest care and it was expensive beyond Polly's wildest dreams. For, apart from her own small inheritance, her stepfather, Mr. Wharton, had insisted on being allowed to contribute to her support, and not to appear too ungracious both to her mother and to him, his offer had been accepted. Yet Polly did not consider herself any greater success in thus masquerading as a rich girl than she had been as a poor one. Was she never to be satisfied? Her school companions were all wealthy and few of them had any ideas beyond clothes and society. To them Polly had seemed a kind of curiosity. She was so impetuous, so brilliant, so full of a thousand moods. Betty Ashton had once said that to know Polly O'Neill was a liberal education, and yet in order to know her one ought to have had a liberal education beforehand. Today during the recreation hour at "Miss Elkins' Finishing School," which was Polly's present abode, there had been a sudden discussion of plans for the future. And Polly, partly because she was in a contradictory mood and partly because she really wished it to be known, had boldly announced herself as poor as a church mouse with no chance of not starving to death in the future unless she could learn to make her own living. And this had started the onslaught of questions from which she had just torn herself away.