The Orchard Secret

For a few uncertain moments no one had spoken. The old flivver bumped over a little hill, and the girls seemed suddenly to realize they were entering upon that much anticipated new experience--college life.

"It's lovely, isn't it!" exclaimed Arden Blake, resting her hand on Terry's shoulder. "Such beautiful pines--so tall and----"

"Mysterious!" supplied Sim Westover, making a dive for her compact.

"Thank you. I was about to say--stately," remarked Arden with assumed superciliousness. "And see the deer behind the bush, a stone deer, I suppose. But it's all so lovely!"

"Lovely indeed," agreed Terry as she was apt to do with anything Arden said or did. "Don't you think so, Sim?"

Sim, occupying most of the back seat of the rickety station car, felt differently about it and said so. Sim was that way.

"It's all very well," she murmured, busy with her compact, "all very well, my good girls, but isn't it about time we got inside the college? After a train trip like the one we have just endured, I'll be glad to get my feet off Arden's suitcase. Wherever did you get such a big one, Arden?"

"It was given to me when we all decided to come to Cedar Ridge. You'll wish it was yours when you see what's inside. Oh, look! That must be the swimming-pool building!" There could be no mistake about it as they could note when the harassed little flivver was slowly completing the half circle of the cinder drive which curved like a crescent moon in front of Cedar Ridge College, and was approaching a glass-roofed structure set somewhat apart from the other buildings.

The roof was dome-shaped, and its glass panes, set in frames of copper which glinted in the rays of the red autumn sun, were thick and green like petrified ocean waves.

As they rattled past the pool building they saw a wheelbarrow standing right in the pathway. Somehow that odd obstruction looked out of place near a natatorium, and Sim said so, adding:

"I wonder what's the idea?"

"Oh, they're probably just cleaning it out," suggested Arden.

The cultivated rustic setting for the big gray stone structures made the whole scene picturesquely perfect, just as the prospectus had stated. But to the girls the college was also a little forbidding. Certainly there was nothing cozy about it--nothing inviting--and not every girl can boast the artist's taste.

The buildings were solid and massive, as solid and dependable as the women instructors within who guided the four student years of "their girls." Besides the swimming pool, only the chapel, with its tall spire, caught the warm sunset glow and displayed it more lavishly. But that, of course, thought Arden, was because there was so much more glass, beautifully tinted, in the chapel windows.

As the wheels of the car crunched the cinders, Arden hoped she hadn't been wrong in urging Terry and Sim to come to Cedar Ridge with her. They had come because of her urging. There was no doubt of this. Had it not been for the promise of swimming, implied by the beautiful picture of the pool in the college prospectus, Sim would, she said, have been content to stay at home in Pentville.

As for Terry--where Arden went, there went Terry. They had been inseparable since the "baby grade" in Vincent Prep.

The driver of the car, a typical country taxi-man, probably too well trained to talk unbidden to the students, pulled up suddenly as he neared a lane that curved around a big elm and wended its way toward a distant grove.