came much to her who lived within a mile of David and who yet was cut off for months at a time from even a chance glimpse of him in a car or upon the street and who seldom met any one who knew him. For Alice had been avoiding the university and the university people who lived near, although she kept up correspondence with girls who lived out of town and especially with Myra, who was at her home in Rock Island.
Through Myra, she heard about Lan, who had finished his medical course and was an interne in a hospital in Baltimore; but Lan knew nothing about David in these days and, conversely, it was probable that David knew nothing about Lan, not even that Myra and Lan at last were to be married, next month. The letter from Myra, which told Alice the day, recalled almost unbearably the plan which the four of them—David and Lan, and Myra and she—had made long ago when David and she would first have Lan and Myra for best man and maid of honor and then David would be Lan's best man and she, Myra's matron of honor.
The letter came in the week when college was opening again and when the "active" Tau Gamma chapter—the girls in college—were telephoning to Alice to please come up and help "rush"; for with the start of the new term and the appearance of a new class on the campus, every fraternity and every sorority was in combat against each other to pledge to itself the best of the freshman girls or boys.
This combat was so keen and so serious that it en-
