Ruth Fielding At College Part 9

"I think that is unkind," returned Ruth, shaking her head. "Maybe Miss Frayne is a very nice girl."

"I wonder what she's got in all those bags and the big trunk?" said Jennie. "I see she's wearing the same dress she traveled in."

"I wager she misses her maid," sighed Helen. "Can't dress without one, I s'pose."

But there were too many other girls to watch and to comment on for the trio to give much attention to Rebecca Frayne. Ruth, however, said, with a little laugh:

"I must feel some interest in her. Her initials are the same as mine."

"And her arrival certainly took the curse off yours, my dear," Jennie agreed. "Edie Phelps and her crowd were laying for you and no mistake."

"I wonder if we shouldn't eschew all slang now that we have come to Ardmore?" Helen suggested demurely.

"You set the example then, my lady!" cried Heavy.

Miss Comstock, the very severe looking senior, sat at the table at which the Briarwood trio of freshmen found their numbers; but Miss Frayne was at the housekeeper's table. There were ten or twelve girls at each table and throughout the meal a pleasant hum of voices filled the room.

Ruth and Helen, not to mention their fleshy chum, were soon at their ease with their neighbors; nor did Miss Comstock prove such a bugaboo as they feared. Although the senior was a particularly silent girl, she had a pleasant smile and was no wet blanket upon the enjoyment of the dinner. At least, she did not serve as a wet blanket upon Jennie Stone.

The fleshy girl's appet.i.te betrayed the fact that she had been stinted at noon, and that a diet of string beans was scarcely a satisfactory one.

As they left the dining-room and came out into the wide, well-lighted entrance hall of the house, a lady just entering bowed to Jennie Stone.

"There she is!" groaned the fleshy girl. "Caught in the act!"

"Who is she, Heavy?" demanded Helen, in an undertone.

"She looks nice," observed Ruth.

"Miss Cullam. She's the one that advised the string beans," declared Jennie out of the corner of her mouth. Then she added, most cordially: "Oh! how do you do! These are my two chums from Briarwood--Ruth Fielding and Helen Cameron. Miss Cullam, girls."

The teacher, who was rather elderly, but very brisk and neat, if not wholly attractive, approached smiling.

"You will meet me in mathematics, young ladies," she said, shaking hands with the two introduced freshmen. "And how are you to-night, Miss Stone?

Have you stuck to your vegetable diet, as I advised?"

Heavy made her jolly, round face seem as long as possible, and groaned hollowly.

"Oh, Miss Cullam!" she said, "I believe I could have stuck to the diet, if----"

"Well, if what?" demanded the teacher.

"If the diet would only stick to _me_. But it doesn't. I ate _pecks_ of string beans for lunch, and by the middle of the afternoon I felt like a castaway after two weeks upon a desert island."

"Nonsense, Miss Stone!" exclaimed the teacher, yet laughing too. Heavy was so ridiculous that it was impossible not to be amused. "You should practise abstinence. Really, you are the very fattest girl at Ardmore, I do believe."

"That sounds horrid!" declared Jennie with sudden vigor, and she did not look pleased.

"You may as well face the truth, my dear," said the mathematics teacher, eyeing the distressing curves of the fleshy girl without prejudice.

"Here are upwards of a thousand girls--or will be when all have arrived and registered. And you will be locally famous."

"Oh, don't!" groaned Ruth.

"Poor Heavy!" gasped Helen.

Miss Cullam uttered a short laugh.

"Your friends evidently love you, my dear," she said, patting the fleshy girl's plump cheek. "But you want to make new friends--you wish to be admired, I know. It will not be pleasant to gain the reputation of being Ardmore's heavyweight, will it?"

"It sounds pretty bad," admitted Heavy, coming out of her momentary slough of despond. "But we all have our little troubles, don't we, Miss Cullam?"

Somehow this question seemed to quench the teacher of mathematics' good spirits. A cloud settled upon her countenance, and she nodded seriously.

"We all have; true enough, Miss Stone," she said. "And I hope you, as pupils at Ardmore, will never suffer such disturbance of mind as I, a teacher, sometimes do."

Ruth, who had started up the stairway next to the teacher, put a friendly hand upon Miss Cullam's arm. "I hope we three will never add to your burdens, my dear Miss Cullam," she whispered.

The instructor flashed a rather wondering look at the girl of the Red Mill; then she smiled. It was a grouty person, indeed, who could look into Ruth Fielding's frank countenance and not return her smile.

"Bless you! I have heard of you already, Ruth Fielding. I have no idea I shall be troubled by you or your friends." They had fallen behind the others a few steps. "But we never can tell. Since last term--well!"

Much, evidently, was on Miss Cullam's mind; yet she kept step with Ruth when they came to the corridor on which the rooms of the three Briarwoods opened. Ruth could always find something pleasant to say.

This woman with the care-graved countenance smiled whimsically as she listened, keeping at the girl's shoulder.

Evidently somewhat oppressed by the attentions of the instructor, Helen and Heavy had disappeared into the fleshy girl's room.

"Do come in and see how nicely we have fixed our sitting-room--study, I mean, of course," and Ruth laughed, opening the door.

"Looks homelike," confessed Miss Cullam. Then, with a startled glance around the room, she murmured: "Why, it's the very room!"

"What is that you say?" asked Ruth, curiously.

"Do you know who had this room last year?"

"Of course I haven't the first idea," returned the girl of the Red Mill.

"Miss Rolff."

"Do I know her?" asked Ruth, somewhat puzzled.

"She left before the end of the term. I--I am not sure just what the matter was with her. But she is connected in my mind with a great misfortune."

"Indeed, Miss Cullam?" said the sympathetic Ruth.

It was, perhaps, the sympathy in her tone that urged the instructor to confide her trouble to a strange girl--a freshman, at that!

"I hope I shall never have the same fears and doubts regarding you and your friends, Miss Fielding, that I have felt about some of these girls who are now soph.o.m.ores--and some of the juniors, too."

"Oh, Miss Cullam! What do you mean?"