If Neil Stewart was amused by this sudden change in the lady's tactics, to his credit be it said that he did not betray any sign of it. He thanked her for her kind interest in Peggy and his home, for all she had done for them, and left nothing lacking for her comfort upon her homeward journey, even shipping to the apartment in New York enough fruit, game and various other good things from Severndale to keep her larder well supplied for weeks, and supplementing all these with a gift which would be the envy of all her friends. But when he returned to Severndale after bidding the lady farewell at the station, he breathed one mighty sigh of relief. He had escaped a situation of which the outcome was a good deal more than problematical for everyone concerned, and most vital for Peggy.
Then came busy days of preparation for Peggy and Polly, for the outcome of that fireside powwow had been a decision in favor of Columbia Heights School for Polly also, for that winter at least, and when the fifteenth dawned bright and frosty, Mrs. Harold accompanied the girls to Washington, Captain Stewart's leave having meantime expired. But he had gone back to his ship in a very different frame of mind from that in which he had returned to it in July, and with a comforting sense of security in the outcome of his present plans for Peggy. The longer he knew Mrs. Harold the greater became his confidence in her judgment, and she had assured him that Peggy should be her charge that winter exactly as Polly was. Moreover, Mrs. Harold had persuaded Mrs. Howland to close her house in Montgentian for the winter and come to Annapolis, bringing Gail with her, for Constance had decided to follow the _Rhode Island_ whenever it was possible for her to do so, and this decision left Mrs. Howland and Gail alone in their home. So to Wilmot Hall came Polly's mother and pretty sister, the former to spend a delightfully restful winter with her sister and the latter to take her first taste of the good times possible for a girl of twenty-one at the Naval Academy.
The first breaking away from Severndale was harder for Peggy than anyone but Mrs. Harold guessed. Somehow intuition supplied to her what actual words could never have conveyed, even had they been spoken, but Peggy, once her resolution had been taken to go away to school, was not a girl to bewail her decision. And now she was a duly registered pupil at Columbia Heights with Polly for her room-mate in number 67, her next-door neighbor Natalie Vincent, Mrs. Vincent's daughter, a jolly, honest, happy-go-lucky girl, who looked exactly as her mother must have looked at fifteen. A long line of rooms extended up and down, both sides of the corridor, the end one, No. 70, with its pretty bay-window overlooking the lawn and Stony Brook beyond, was occupied by Stella Drummond, a tall, striking brunette of eighteen. To the hundred-fifty girls in Columbia Heights School this story can only allude in a brief way but of those who figure most prominently in Polly's and Peggy's new world we'll let Polly give the general "sizing-up." These girls were all about the same age, and, excepting Stella, juniors, as were Peggy and Polly, whose previous work under tutors and in high school had qualified them to enter that grade at Columbia Heights.