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THE SUN IN THE CLASS-ROOM
81

was such a hope. She would not be afraid of Fidelia Netley! Yet she was more afraid since her walk to college with Miss Netley this morning when everybody had compared them and when David, looking at her past Fidelia Netley, had been disappointed in her. He had not wanted to be but he was! Oh, she had felt that!

How strange that he could forget it and absorb himself in what a lecturer was saying about the law of joint cost. But there David was, listening, making notes, buried in economics as though nothing had happened, while she was waiting for the end of the hour to know whether her world was, after all, to go on as before or whether everything would be changed for her now.

The bell, and the ending of the lecture, brought David back from costs and factors of production. He slipped his note-book into his pocket and stood up, glancing toward the girls and waiting, as the men usually did, for the girls to go first from the class. The opened door let in the chatter and bustle of the hall.

Ten minutes were allowed for changing classes, and for going from building to building; so the students whose next lecture was under the same roof, had liberal time to visit in the hall. On the first floor of "old University," there was much passing to and fro and there the most popular girls—and sometimes the men after a football victory or a class election—held impromptu levee.

A girl was the center of the group now near the bulletin board and Alice knew that girl, without