After the first busy and exciting weeks when everything was new and a little terrifying, the girls settled down to regular work and, at times to a rather dull life, so sometimes very small events loomed quite large to their young eyes. Of course there were letters from home. And there was no more thrilling moment in the day than that in which Sallie Dickinson appeared on the school platform, at the close of the two o’clock session, with the old brown mail bag under her arm.
Sallie’s blouses were old and faded and her skirt had seen better days but little Jane Pool declared that the post-girl always looked just like an angel when she stepped in through the doorway with that dingy bag.
And of course the girls wrote letters, large numbers of them, to the persons on their writing lists. Some of them liked to write letters and wrote very fat ones. Some of them, like Mabel for instance, hated to write letters and wrote very thin ones. One rainy afternoon, the freckled girl, Cora Doyle, regaled her friends with a distressing tale.
“Do you know,” said she, from her perch on Jean’s window sill, “I believe Dr. Rhodes reads our letters before he sends them. Mine are always late getting to my folks and I’ve seen heaps of letters stacked up in his office for days at a time. And one evening I went in to ask for a piece of courtplaster for Ruth Dennis’s thumb and all those Rhodes people were around a table doing something to a lot of mail.”
“Perhaps,” said Jean, who knew that Cora was apt to make mountains out of molehills, “they were just looking to see if they were stamped or properly addressed. You know they have to bring them back to us sometimes for reasons like that.”
“I don’t know,” returned Cora. “Things are queer and different this year. I’d like to, but I can’t tell you why.”
“Do tell us,” begged Henrietta.
“No, I can’t. I promised not to.”
“There’s one thing,” said Jean, “that surprises me. Doctor Rhodes isn’t a bit like a school teacher. And when he talks to us in the school room as he sometimes does when he has anything to announce like new rules or a lecture or a concert in the village, he often uses the wrong word or mispronounces a word, as if—well, as if he weren’t used to making speeches in very good English.”
“I think he gets rattled,” said little Jane Pool, sagely.
“Somehow,” said Marjory, “I don’t exactly like Doctor Rhodes. I don’t exactly believe in him.”
“I don’t quite like him, either,” declared Henrietta, who had washed her wonderful mop of hair and was drying it with a large bathtowel. “I’m surprised at my Grandmother for saying such nice things about him. When there are visitors he seems so oily and so smooth; and it seems to me that he is extra polite to those Miller girls—all the world uses their father’s soap, you know—but when he asks Sallie to do errands he doesn’t even say please. And Mrs. Rhodes is always gliding about like the ghost of Hamlet’s Father. She looks as if she were listening with all her features. But she never says a thing to us, even when she catches us slipping around through the corridors after lights are out.”
“I’m glad she doesn’t,” said Marjory. “She looks all the things she doesn’t say.”
“After all,” said Jean, sagely, “they might be a lot worse.”
The next day was Sunday and Sundays were quite different from all the other days. In the morning the girls always marched two by two to church a long mile away, where they sat in the front pews with their eyes fixed upon the clergyman. This often proved a trying ordeal for that gentleman because this particular church had no regular rector. Instead, each Sunday, a student from the Theological Seminary just north of the village offered up home made prayers and stammered forth his first sermon before the long suffering members of that little church. Each successive student, it seemed, was more bashful than the last; and if any one of those blushing young preachers had ever learned to deliver a sermon, he promptly forgot all he knew, when, for the first time, he faced a congregation. There was one thing, however, that all these stuttering young men could do and that was to perspire copiously and continuously. No matter how many impressive gestures the preacher might have practised at home beforehand, he used only one while he occupied that pulpit. With handkerchief clutched firmly in his shaking right hand, he mopped and mopped and mopped his dripping brow.
While the girls couldn’t help being amused, they were always sorry for the tortured youths.
“You wouldn’t think,” said Cora, after one of these painful ordeals, “that they’d be afraid to face thirty or forty girls but they always are. Just as soon as their eyes light on those ten pews full of Highland Hall girls, their carefully prepared words take flight, and I guess they’d like to, too.”
“They seem to find it almost as hard to pass the plate,” laughed Henrietta. “When they get to us their knees begin to wobble.”
“It’s because we stare at those poor creatures so unmercifully,” said Jean. “Even a real minister would be embarrassed, I should think.”
“I’m sorry for them, too,” said Bettie, “but they are funny. Of course they have to learn to preach if they’re going to be ministers, but it seems cruel to make them do it that way.”
“Just like dumping puppies into cold water to teach them to swim,” said Marjory.
“It isn’t very much like our kind of church,” complained Bettie. “It’s too entertaining. We’re Episcopalians and our ministers don’t have to learn how to make their own prayers—the folks that make them know how.”
“Yes,” said Jean, “we’re all getting lonesome for our own kind of services. That’s one thing we miss.”
“Well, then,” said Sallie Dickinson, “I have some good news for you. In about four weeks more the new Episcopal Church will be ready for use and you can go there. Miss Woodruff and Mrs. Henry Rhodes are Episcopalians, so perhaps we’ll all go. We used to go to the old church before it was torn down.”
“I think,” said Henrietta, demurely, “we ought to come back to this church once in a while just to keep those poor Theologs perspiring. Miss Woodruff says perspiring is necessary to good health.”
The Sunday dinners were apt to be rather good; there was usually chicken.
“But,” complained Mabel, after one of these chicken dinners, “I don’t see why I have to get all the lizzers and gizzers.”
“What!” gasped Maude.
“Givers and lizzers; no, gizzers and lizards,” sputtered Mabel. “I always get them.”
“She means livers and gizzards,” explained Jean.
Sunday afternoons dragged. The girls could walk within bounds but that was not particularly exciting. On week days they usually gathered nuts in the grove—if one threw enough sticks it was possible to knock down a hickory nut or two most any day; or explored an ancient garden in which there were old apple trees. But in Sunday frocks and Sunday shoes it was wiser to stick to the sidewalks, so the girls strolled about and gossiped. It was truly surprising how much they found to talk about.
Sometimes on rainy Sunday afternoons, Henrietta gathered a flock of the younger girls about her on the wide front staircase, a dim, spooky, black walnutty place with a vast dark space overhead, and told thrilling tales. That was one thing that Henrietta could do to perfection.
But Sunday evenings at Highland Hall were almost invariably harrowing. The girls gathered about the piano in the big, chilly drawing room and sang familiar hymns and wept.
Sallie Dickinson wept because she hadn’t any home. The rest of them wept because they had. Still, Sunday after Sunday evening they sang the same sorrowful hymns because it seemed the proper thing to do, and then retired sniffling and snuffling to their narrow, single beds.
“They like it,” declared Mrs. Henry Rhodes. “Boarding school girls always do it, and they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t enjoy it.”
There was one Sunday evening, however, when the gloom was somewhat lightened; and when giggles supplanted sobs. Stout Miss Woodruff, clad in her smooth gray serge gown, with its white vest for Sunday use only, usually sat in a large arm-chair at the end of the room, in order to lend dignity to the meeting. But on this occasion she was absent and had asked Abbie to take her place. Poor scatter-brained Abbie had forgotten all about it so the chair was vacant. But not for long.
The chief ornament of the high mantel shelf was a large stuffed bird—a penguin. When it became evident to the waiting girls that no one was coming to occupy that vacant chair, Maude Wilder, always resourceful, climbed upon a chair, seized the stately penguin and placed him in the chair. With his dignity, his mildly disapproving eye and his smooth gray and white plumage, his resemblance to stern Miss Woodruff—vest and all—was so striking and so amusing that the astonished girls burst forth with a chorus of giggles instead of words when Mrs. Henry Rhodes, at the piano, played the opening notes of the first hymn.
Of course Mrs. Henry turned around to see what caused this most unusual hilarity. When she saw the solemn penguin doing his birdlike best to be human and succeeding so admirably in filling Miss Woodruff’s place, Mrs. Henry not only giggled but laughed outright; and all the pupils, including the lofty Seniors, joined in. For the rest of the evening, even the saddest hymns failed to bring on a single case of homesickness.
“But,” warned Mrs. Henry, restoring the bird to his lofty perch when the singing was finished, “we must never do this again. We’ve all been very bad.”
“I love that lady,” said Maude, on the way upstairs. “If she were my teacher I’d be good all the time.”
“I hope,” giggled Sallie Dickinson, “I won’t forget and call Miss Woodruff ‘Miss Penguin.’ I shall never be able to dust that bird again without thinking of her.”
One morning, late in October, there was great excitement at Highland Hall. It was just at recess time and all the girls (except Maude Wilder and Debbie Clark who were under the porch foraging for pie) were on the veranda or the graveled walk. Two new pupils were arriving. They were not together for they came in separate hacks. The first was a large girl of fourteen who, followed by a small, meek father, marched fearlessly up the steps and looked each girl straight in the eye until she reached Sallie Dickinson, who stood in the doorway, smiling a welcome.
“I’m Victoria Webster of Iowa,” said she, “and I’ve come here to school. Where’s Doctor What d’ye-callum? I’ve come here after an education and I want it right away.”
And then Victoria deliberately turned and winked at the Miller girls; a real wink, with one bold blue eye wide open, the other shut. Victoria, the surprised girls perceived, was as fresh as a breeze from her own prairie, and they were instantly prepared to enjoy her.
The other hack disgorged its contents. An overdressed woman in ridiculous shoes stepped out; an overdressed girl in even more ridiculous shoes followed her. The girl, fair-haired and exceedingly fluffy was almost as violently perfumed as Madame Bolande herself.
Jean, Marjory, Bettie and Mabel glanced casually at this second young person and suddenly gasped. They had received a jolt. Then they looked inquiringly at one another and back again at the girl. They couldn’t quite believe their eyes.
“What’s her name?” demanded Marjory, when Sallie, who had escorted the last newcomers inside returned to the porch.
“Gladys de Milligan, of Milwaukee,” returned Sallie, holding her nose. “Her father must be a perfume factory.”
The Lakeville girls looked at one another again.
“Gladys de Milligan,” breathed Marjory.
“Laura Milligan!” gasped Mabel. “Of all things, Laura Milligan!”
“Hush,” warned Jean, a finger on her lips. “Come down on the lawn. We’ll have to talk this over by ourselves.”
“It’s Laura all right,” said Bettie. “Her hair’s a lot lighter than it used to be and she’s taller and much more elegant; but it’s the same turned up nose and the same twisty shoulders and the same small eyes, too close together.”
“And the same horrid mother,” said Mabel. “What shall we do?”
“Let’s not do anything,” counseled wise Jean. “Let’s wait and see if she recognizes us.”
“Perhaps anybody as grand as that,” offered Marjory, hopefully, “wouldn’t want to know plain blue serge folks like us. Of course we wouldn’t exactly want the Highland Hall girls to think she was an old friend of ours—”
“She wasn’t,” said Mabel, emphatically.
“Well,” argued Jean, “perhaps Laura has changed—certainly she has changed her name. It wouldn’t be quite fair or kind for us to tell the other girls the things we know about her. We can wait until we have her by herself before we seem to recognize her. And maybe she has improved—”
“She needed to,” said Marjory, sagely. “Shan’t we even tell Henrietta?”
“I don’t believe we need to,” returned Jean. “Henrietta won’t like her anyway. She’s too—well, too cheap. She isn’t Henrietta’s kind, you know.”
“The Milligans must have made money,” said Marjory. “They hadn’t any such clothes in Lakeville.”
“Lakeville would have dropped dead if they had,” giggled Bettie.
At first “Gladys” pretended not to recognize the little girls with whom she had once played in Lakeville; but, needing some one to show her the way to a class room, she waylaid Marjory in the hall and called her by name.
“Now, listen,” warned Gladys, shifting her gum to the other side of her mouth. “Don’t let anybody hear you calling me Laura. It isn’t my name any more. I always hated that name and Milligan, too. Mother calls me Gladys—Gladys Evelyn de Milligan.”
“What’s the ‘D’ for,” asked honest Marjory.
“That’s French,” explained Laura. “It’s d e, de.”
“But Milligan isn’t French.”
“It’s more elegant that way,” explained Laura, shifting her gum again. “We’re society people now. It looks better in print when Mother’s ‘Among those present.’ Now listen. Now that you know my name, see that you remember it. And tell those other Lakeville girls they can do the same thing.”
Although the Miller girls’ father supplied the world with soap, although three continents ate the breakfast food that Hazel Benton’s uncle manufactured, no one at Highland Hall paraded her wealth and her so-called “Social standing” as vulgar little Gladys de Milligan paraded hers. She was always painted and powdered and overdressed; she was reckless with her spending money, snobbish and artificial to the very final degree; yet, fortunately for gum-chewing Laura, there were girls who seemed to like her.
Most of the girls, however, liked Victoria Webster much better. To be sure Victoria had her faults, but they were pleasanter faults than Laura’s. Every one of the youngsters admired and tried to imitate Victoria’s marvelously perfect wink. Maude came the nearest to achieving success; and little Lillian Thwaite failed the most dismally.
“Don’t try it on a cold day,” warned Victoria, “you might freeze that way, Lillian, with your mouth half way up your cheek and your nose in a knot.”
It was a joy to see Victoria and Maude play ball. They went at it precisely like a pair of boys. And Victoria shared Maude’s affection for pie.
Madame Bolande liked Gladys Evelyn de Milligan but sarcastic Miss Woodruff did not. When she called upon that young person in class, she frequently pretended that she had forgotten her name, so that one day, to the great amusement of her classmates, Laura would be called Ambrosia Nectarine and the next Miss Woodruff would address her as Verbena Heliotrope, Gladiolus Violet or Lucretia Calliopsis or something else equally ridiculous; but a new one for every occasion. This, of course, wasn’t exactly kind or even quite courteous; but it is safe to say that Gladys Evelyn began to regret having changed and embellished her plain if not beautiful name. Perhaps, before Miss Woodruff had entirely exhausted her supply of fancy names, poor Gladys Evelyn may have envied little Jane Pool. No one ever forgot or pretended to forget Jane’s very brief and very plain name, except Doctor Rhodes, who forgot everybody’s.
Jane was a small girl with a very bright, eager face, smooth brown hair and a great deal of character. Just about everybody liked Jane.
“Are you related to those grand Chicago Pools?” asked Gladys Evelyn one day, as she peeled a fresh stick of gum.
“Mercy, no,” returned Jane, who had listened for a weary half hour to Laura’s tales about her own wonderful people. “There’s nothing grand about us—we’re just plain Pools—little common Pools like mud puddles. No limousines, no diamonds, no ancestors. Just three meals a day and a bed at night. We’re just folks—the commonest kind.”
And Gladys, not noticing the twinkle in Jane’s bright black eye, believed the little rascal, only to learn later that Jane’s father was accounted one of the wealthiest men in the state of Wisconsin. But you never would have known it from Jane.
“I wish,” complained Henrietta, one day, “we hadn’t been two days late in getting to this school. All the girls engaged their walking partners before we came. I like to walk with Victoria—she steps right off like a man—but Gladys Evelyn de Milligan—phew! With all those heels and that tight skirt she can’t walk. But I’ll say one thing for Gladys. She can chew gum.”
“We didn’t mean to leave you out when we four paired off,” assured Jean. “But Marjory asked me and Mabel asked Bettie—why, of course we can switch off sometimes. The old girls engaged their partners last year.”
These walks occurred three times a week. On Sundays, when the entire school walked two by two to church. On Tuesday, when the girls were taken, again in twos, to the village to shop; and on Fridays when they went to the cemetery. The only reason they went to the cemetery was because a walk of a mile and a half straight west ended there.
Sallie Dickinson usually walked with poor old Abbie Smith, the chaperon. Abbie was a forlorn creature, neither old nor young. She had a long red nose, a retreating chin, drooping shoulders and a rounded back. Colorless, straggling hair and pale eyes. A spineless, unpleasant person. Like Sallie Dickinson, she was an orphan. Like Sallie, poor old Abbie had been left penniless at Highland Hall, but at an earlier date. It was said that Abbie’s stepfather had deliberately abandoned her; and, looking at Abbie, it seemed not unlikely. One would have supposed that twenty years of school life would have educated Abbie but they hadn’t. Abbie was incapable of acquiring an education.
“When I look at Abbie,” confided Sallie, one day, as she laid an armful of freshly laundered garments on Jean’s bed, “it makes me just sick. Am I going to be like that twenty years from now?”
“Of course you’re not,” consoled Jean, “You’re ever so bright in school and you—why, Sallie! It’s all in your own hands. If you learn every blessed thing you can, some day you’ll be smart enough to teach. And then, probably, they’d be glad enough to have you teach right here. And if they wouldn’t, you could go some place else. Don’t ever think that you have to stay here and be a stupid, downtrodden servant like poor old Abbie.”
“Well, do you know,” said Sallie, visibly brightening, “I did think just exactly that. I wake up nights and worry about it. Oh, Jean! I do wish you’d poke me up once in awhile, whenever you see me losing my backbone or looking like Abbie—”
“You don’t look like Abbie—you couldn’t. Abbie never was pretty or bright and you are. Wait, I want to give you these history notes I dug up—I know they kept you busy all study hour sorting the clean clothes so of course you didn’t have time to look anything up. You’ll just have to have splendid marks from now on.”
“You’re a darling!” cried Sallie, rubbing her cheek against Jean’s. “I wish you’d reached Hiltonburg a whole lot sooner. I needed you.”
Almost at once, there was one very curious and amusing result of Madame Bolande’s friendship for “Gladys de Milligan.” Madame, who apparently took no interest in her own hair, professed great admiration for that of the new pupil and offered to teach her a new and even fancier way of arranging it.
One night, to that end, Madame mixed an exceedingly sticky something in a cup—quince seed and water, Laura explained afterwards—and applied it to Laura’s pale yellow locks. After plastering them down in large wet rings all over Laura’s foolish head, Madame fished the remnant of an old green veil from her untidy bureau drawer and tied it firmly over the slippery mass. Her intentions were perfectly good but the result was surprising.
By morning, the quince seed was dry and it was possible to brush the stuff, in a powdery shower of white particles, from the mass of loose curls. But alas! A shocking thing had happened. The dye in the green veil had proved anything but permanent. It had spent the night running. Poor Gladys Evelyn appeared late for breakfast with red eyes and bright green hair. It was at least a month before her tangled locks lost their verdant hue.
“Never mind, Gladys,” soothed Grace Allen. “Mermaids have green hair and you know how beautiful they are.”
Oddly enough, this curious mishap made several new friends for Gladys among the girls, whose ready sympathy was aroused for an unfortunate maiden who had to go about with pale green hair. Augusta Lemon was one of those tender hearted young persons, Lillian Thwaite another. About this time, too, Grace Allen began to wander about, arm in arm, with Gladys.
Cora Doyle, to whom the Lakeville girls were greatly indebted for much of the past history of Highland Hall, proved a likeable girl, after one learned not to believe all that she said. Cora just naturally exaggerated. When she was cold she was absolutely frozen. When she was warm, she was positively boiled. If she possessed one black and blue spot she knew she had ten thousand and if she were slightly indisposed she was positive she was dying. In short, she called “Wolf, Wolf,” when the wolf was conspicuously absent.
This trait of Cora’s was beginning to lead to embarrassing consequences. Cora’s wild statements in school were always taken with a grain of salt. Worse than that, her own people wouldn’t believe her. Even when she outgrew her shoes and wrote home for larger ones, they were sure she only meant more stylish ones; so poor Cora limped about in short shoes and acquired a corn. And now she had a new trouble. Whether it was basketball or the extra pie that she ate under the porch with Maude, no one knew, but Cora began suddenly to grow very rapidly. Her sleeves and her skirts were visibly retreating and she was showing more wrist and more stocking than was considered becoming.
“My folks won’t believe me,” wailed Cora, reading her letter from home. “I’ve told them that my knees show and my sleeves are up to my elbows and they won’t believe me.”
“But your skirts aren’t up to your knees,” laughed Marjory.
“Anyway, they’re getting there and I have to stay up nights letting out hems.”
“Never mind,” consoled Jean, “your folks will see for themselves, when you go home for Christmas. Of course you may have to go in a paper bag—”
“That’s just the trouble. I don’t go home for Christmas—I live too far away. I’m going to visit Maude in Chicago—and it’s her folks that will see for themselves how many miles of legs and wrists I’m showing.”
“That’s what you get for stretching things,” laughed Henrietta. “Your arms and legs have caught it.”
“I didn’t get any letter at all,” grumbled Mabel. “Anybody gets more than I do.”
“Cheer up,” said Jean. “Perhaps you’ll have two tomorrow. In the meantime you can read mine—there’s quite a lot of Lakeville news in it.”
“Wait a minute, girls,” called Helen Miller, climbing up on the platform beside Sallie. “Have any of you seen my amethyst pendant? I thought I left it in a little box on my dresser, but I may have worn it out and dropped it. Anyway, if you find one, it’s mine.”
Several of the girls looked at one another significantly.
Queer things were happening at Highland Hall. There were mysterious disappearances; but whether they were due to carelessness or whether they were due to theft, no one could say. The fact remained. Various things of more or less value had vanished; and their owners were both puzzled and distressed. Hazel Benton had somehow lost her wrist watch, Ruth Dennis mourned a gold pencil that usually dangled from a ribbon about her neck, Mabel’s sentimental roommate, Isabelle, could not find the large gold locket containing Clarence’s picture—that vanished, Isabelle declared, while she was taking a bath, the only time she didn’t have it on.
Then, one morning, there was a scene in the dining room, where the girls and the teachers were eating their breakfast rolls and the two neat maids were passing the coffee. Madame Bolande, all excitement, and with her black dress face-powdered from collar to hem and her hair even wilder than usual, rushed into the dining room and declared volubly that two ten dollar bills had disappeared from the stocking under her bed.
“And,” declared Madame, balefully, “eet ees zat Mees Henrietta zat have taken zem. She ees the most baddest Mademoiselle zat I have een my class.”
At this point, just when things were getting really interesting, Doctor and Mrs. Rhodes rose hastily from their chairs, seized Madame by the elbows and escorted her quite neatly from the public gaze. The girls would have been glad to hear more.
Fortunately no one believed Madame’s accusation of Henrietta because all the girls knew how little love was lost between that lively girl and the untidy French woman. Madame always blamed Henrietta for anything that happened. Occasionally she was right, because Henrietta was a young bundle of mischief, with no respect whatsoever for Madame Bolande; but the girls knew that Henrietta was no thief. And Henrietta, far from appearing downcast at Madame’s outrageous words, giggled cheerfully and considered it a joke.
And then something else happened that turned even Madame’s unjust suspicion away from Henrietta. There was a burglar scare, a real burglar scare, in Hiltonburg. It lasted three weeks, during which time suddenly intimidated householders locked all their doors instead of just a few, bought catches for every one of their windows and caused themselves agonies of discomfort by putting their valuables away in supposedly burglar-proof spots overnight. Whether or not there really was a burglar at the bottom of this alarm nobody was able to discover; but the scare was certainly big enough and genuine enough while it lasted to upset the entire community. It started in the heart of the village, worked itself gradually along the State road, and, by the time it was a week or ten days old, crept through the hedge that surrounded Highland Hall and right into the house itself.
For days the girls talked of nothing else. Of course the different girls were affected in different ways. The three Seniors moved into one room and slept three in a bed, with their valuables under the mattress. Little Lillian Thwaite couldn’t think of the burglar without turning faint. Alice Bailey’s big black eyes grew so much bigger and blacker at mention of him that the sight always sent Augusta Lemon, who was particularly sympathetic, into spasms of fear. Bettie refused to walk through the corridors alone, even by broad daylight.
Victoria Webster was of different fiber. “Victoria,” as everybody knows, means “A Conqueror.” It certainly seemed as if this particular bearer of the name had conquered fear. At any rate she was not afraid. Moreover, she was not only courageous but she bragged about it until the other girls were just a little tired of it.
“I’d like to see the burglar I’d be afraid of,” boasted Victoria. “See here, Lillian, if you and Augusta and Bettie are afraid, I’ll move into the West Dormitory and take care of you.”
“I wish to goodness you would,” declared Lillian. “Bettie’s all right, but Augusta and I are all alone in number twenty-six.”
“Do move in today,” pleaded Augusta. “There’s a vacant bed—really, that’s one reason why the room is so scary. It’s bad enough to have to look under one’s own bed without having that extra one—we’ve been taking turns. Let’s go and ask Miss Woodruff to let you come—she’s the matron in our corridor, you know.”
“I was about to suggest that very thing,” replied Miss Woodruff, regarding burglar-proof Victoria with a quizzical eye. “If this brave Victoria can instill some of her surplus courage into this quaking Lillian and this shuddering Augusta, by all means let her do it.”
“Victoria is really almost too courageous,” remarked Mrs. Henry Rhodes, when the girls had left the school room. “She just bristles with bravery. I’d like to frighten her just once. She’d have made a fine boy, wouldn’t she, with those broad, sturdy shoulders!”
“She’d have made a blustering one. I suspect that if she had been one, every other boy that knew her would have been tempted to put her bravery to the test. I don’t think that boys take as kindly to braggarts as girls do.”
But even the girls, with the exception of timid Lillian and terrified Augusta, began to grow tired of Victoria’s boasting; for, braced by the admiring devotion of her roommates, Victoria could talk of nothing but her own bravery.
“If a burglar came,” Victoria would brag, “I’d look him straight in the eye and say: ‘See here, Mr. Burglar, I want to talk to you as man to man. I take it you’re a man of sense. Your time is valuable. You’re wasting it here. We’ve only thirty cents a week pocket money. If you were mean enough to take it all you wouldn’t get much. Our jewels came from the five and ten cent store; so just run along to a place where they really have money.’”
“Would you really?” demanded Augusta.
“Yes, I would. I’ve never seen the time yet when I’ve really been afraid of anything.”
“They say,” quavered Lillian, “that they found footsteps—yes, Marjory, I meant foot-prints—under the Browns’ dining room window last Friday—only three houses from this one. Oh, I’m so scared I can’t eat my meals.”
“Don’t be alarmed,” said Victoria. “You have me.”
Victoria had bragged all day. She was still bragging when she climbed into bed, with Lillian’s cot at her left, Augusta’s at her right.
An hour later, the west corridor was wrapped in silence; or it would have been if nine girls had not assembled in Henrietta’s room to whisper excitedly in one another’s ears. Inadvertently, they whispered too in Miss Woodruff’s, as she stood listening just outside the door. Miss Woodruff was not a prying person. She was merely assuring herself that the noises that she couldn’t help hearing were made by girls, not burglars.
“Good!” whispered the pleased teacher as she gathered the gist of this animated buzzing. “It’s a thing I’d love to do myself. Victoria had it coming to her. I shall aid and abet those merry plotters by staying very sound asleep for the next hour.”
Whereupon Miss Woodruff very gently closed her own door and to all appearances had finished her matronly duties for the night.
Ten minutes later, a small white scout slipped noiselessly down the dark corridor toward the room in which Victoria was sleeping. Presently she slipped back into Henrietta’s.
“All three are sound asleep,” reported Jane. “You could stick pins into Victoria and she wouldn’t know it. Now’s the time for action. Don’t waste a minute. She’ll never be sounder asleep than she is now.”
“Jane,” whispered Henrietta, “you and Marjory must get into those two empty beds in the room directly across the hall from Victoria’s and stay in them long enough to get them warmed up, so we can move those other two girls into them. We’ll wait fifteen minutes longer. But if Lillian and Augusta should wake up, we’ll just have to whisk them into a closet and clap our hands over their mouths.”
For perhaps three quarters of an hour that night, Miss Woodruff heard the light patter of bare feet on the corridor matting, the subdued whisperings of girlish voices, the quickly hushed clattering of wood against wood, of metal against crockery, the dragging of bulky objects through narrow doorways. These sounds were punctuated by little gusts of stifled laughter, followed each time by brief periods of absolute silence.
“I do hope,” she whispered, “they’ll succeed. Victoria certainly needs taking down. Dear me, how Marjory giggles! She was never designed for a career of successful burglary.”
After a time the slight brushing of exploring hands and fluttering garments against the corridor walls, told of the otherwise silent flight of nine girlish forms down the long, dark hallway. Then Henrietta’s door closed with a tiny click and for fully fifteen minutes afterwards sounds of suppressed mirth sifted back to Miss Woodruff’s patient but approving ears.
The house was silent when the great clock in the lower hall boomed “One.” Victoria, who had been dreaming in an entirely unprecedented manner, suddenly awoke, to experience a curious sense of physical discomfort. Something was wrong. She groped for the bedclothes. They were gone. She stretched out both hands and her groping fingers came in contact with a firm, level, cold surface not unlike hardwood floor. She moved her fingers—it was floor. No other polished surface had those regularly recurring cracks, Victoria, much alarmed, crept on hands and knees, about the empty room. The window was open, the door closed. With a little gasp of relief, she opened it.
“Thank goodness!” breathed tremulous Victoria, groping about in the hallway, “I’m not locked in. But where in the world am I? Here’s another door.”
It opened. Here, window shades were up and puzzled Victoria made out the outlines of three beds. Her bare toes touched the big fur rug that she knew belonged to Anne Blodgett, her opposite neighbor. The feel of a familiar object in this world of uncertainties was a comforting sensation.
“Anne!” gasped chattering Victoria, plunging bodily into Anne’s bed. “I’m frightened to pieces! If that was my room that I’ve just come out of there isn’t a thing left in it. My bed—even Lillian and Augusta have been stolen. Burglars—or something—carried off every single thing but me. I suppose I was too heavy. I found the window open.”
Anne giggled. There were giggles from the other beds. Victoria guessed the truth. Then having much good sense back of her shortcomings she giggled too.
“Well,” she laughed, “that was a great joke on me, all right. I might be brave enough if I happened to be awake; but what’s the use of courage when a burglar with any enterprise at all could carry me right off to the next county without waking me up.”
“Did you really think it was a sure enough burglar?” asked Anne.
“Yes, I did,” returned honest Victoria, snuggling closer to Anne’s warm body, “and I was simply scared pink. When I found that window wide open instead of just a few inches I was sure somebody had climbed in and carried off everything but me—and I wasn’t sure he hadn’t taken me as well. I could just see a great big black burglar going up and down a long ladder, with bundles on his back, and a partner down below to help him with the heavy ones.”
“We didn’t mean to scare you as much as that,” said Anne, “but you certainly are a fine sleeper. We pulled you around a lot.”
“My mother always said I could outsleep the sleepiest of the ‘Seven Sleepers’ and I guess she was right. But I’m not the only one, Where’s Miss Woodruff all this time? I thought she never slept.”
“Well, she did tonight,” said Anne, supposing she was telling the truth. “And it’s lucky for us that she did.”
“But how did you ever move Lillian and Augusta without waking them?”
“We didn’t. Lillian jumped up the minute we touched her but Jane told her what we were doing so she pitched right in and helped. But Augusta woke right up in the middle of the corridor and began to bleat like the lost sheep of Israel so Henrietta stuffed a stocking in her mouth—one of your thick woolen ones—and jammed her into the clothes press. We had quite a time explaining that we were not the burglar. We handed her Jane’s flashlight so she could see it was us; but she turned it on herself and that frightened her more than ever. She shivered and made queer noises, so Maude had to sit beside her on a lot of shoes and hold her hand for the longest time—and you know Maude hates to hold hands; but Augusta’s all right now. Now move over, Vicky, and take another of your famous naps. You’re welcome to half of my bed as long as you don’t take your half out of the middle.”
The burglar scare subsided gradually and Victoria returned to her own corridor to room with Gladys de Milligan.
“I wouldn’t have picked her out,” sighed Victoria, “but Gladys wanted me—I’m sure I can’t see why.”
“I should have thought,” said Marjory, “she’d like a more wide awake roommate so she could talk all night. Gladys does love to talk.”
“Not at night,” returned Victoria. “She lets me go to sleep at nine o’clock sharp and that’s the last I hear of her until morning.”
The very next day after that Maude Wilder’s weekly allowance of thirty cents was missing from the purse that she had carelessly left on her table and Ruth Dennis’s gold beads were nowhere to be found.
And now the opinion of the school was divided. The more excitable girls were convinced that the burglar had actually gotten in, but there were other girls who were quite as certain that some one inside the house was the thief. But who?
The servants seemed trustworthy; Nora, the fat, good natured cook, Annie and Mary, the two neat maids, the two middle aged laundresses who came in from outside, several days a week; and Charles, the man servant who might be seen each evening walking out with Annie and Mary beside him. It was said that Charles divided his attentions so equally between the two neat maids that if he had been the thief, he would have been obliged to steal everything in pairs in order to divide them with absolute fairness between his two friends; so, of course, that let Charles out. Besides, except when there were trunks to be carried up, Charles never entered the upstairs rooms.
“Of course it isn’t old Abbie,” said Maude, who was under the front porch with Henrietta, bolting hot apple pie. “She’s too much of a rabbit. It’s true she hasn’t any money; but she wouldn’t have gumption enough to steal pennies from a baby’s bank.”
“Do you think it might be Madame Bolande?” asked Henrietta. “She’s so fearfully untruthful and so—so unwashed.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” said Maude. “Her room is stuffed with clothes and things; and you know Helen Miller has lost her pleated skirt.”
“Oh, Cora took that last Sunday. She said she just wouldn’t go to church in her short one. Besides, she had ripped the hem out and hadn’t had time to put in a new one. The Miller girls had gone downstairs and Cora was late, so she just rushed in, grabbed up Helen’s skirt and scrambled into it. I’ll tell her to put it back—she’s just forgotten it.”
At the same moment Gladys Evelyn de Milligan and Augusta were marching up and down the long porch over Maude’s head and Gladys was saying:
“I used to know Marjory Vale in Michigan and I can tell you one thing. She was a horrid little girl, always telling fibs and taking things that didn’t belong to her—her aunt couldn’t keep a thing in her ice box. And Mabel wasn’t anybody at all in Lakeville. And goodness knows how the Tuckers got money enough to send Bettie to school. They’re as poor as church mice and have ragged little boys running all over the place.”
“I wonder that you ever knew such people,” said Augusta, always a little dazzled by Gladys’s magnificence.
“Oh, I didn’t,” denied Gladys, hastily. “I—well, we used to give our old clothes to the Tuckers.”
This was not true, but as Augusta always believed anything she heard, she now believed this and many more of Gladys’s unpleasant tales about the little girls from Upper Michigan and passed them on to her own particular friends; so, in the course of time, Jean, Mabel, Marjory, Bettie; and even Henrietta, whom Gladys had not known in Lakeville, were puzzled and grieved by the odd, unfriendly ways of some of their once cordial schoolmates.
Isabelle Carew, for instance, snubbed Mabel quite heartlessly at times. Attractive little Grace Allen no longer spent her leisure moments with her classmate Marjory; but chummed instead with Ruth Dennis. Alice Bailey no longer wept on Jean’s shoulder during the Sunday night hymns but transferred her tears to Hazel Benton’s convenient collar bone.
As for Augusta Lemon, convinced that the Lakeville girls were no fit associates for any really nice girl, she avoided them as much as possible and became more and more friendly with gum-chewing Gladys. And, as usual, Lillian Thwaite always followed as closely as possible in Augusta’s footsteps.
Losing Augusta and Lillian was not exactly a calamity. Augusta was rather an insipid maiden, with no sense of humor, and the bright little girls from Lakeville had considered her something of a bore. And Lillian was just a silly little person of no great consequence. Still, it was disconcerting and not quite pleasant to be dropped so suddenly, as Marjory said, “even by a sheep like Augusta or a goose like Lillian.”
Fortunately, Sallie Dickinson, Maude Wilder, Cora Doyle, Victoria Webster and little Jane Pool, none of whom admired Gladys, were still friendly; and there were others.
Just now, too, one of the Lakeville girls was having another trouble. As you know, mail time for Sallie Dickinson was always rather a trying time. If Charles returned from the post-office early enough, Sallie opened the bag in the school room and read aloud the name on each envelope as she passed it down to its owner. If Charles happened to be late, Sallie delivered the letters at the girls’ doors.
In either case, there were no letters for Sallie, no little packages from home—because she had no home—no little surprises like those that brought delighted squeals from her more fortunate schoolmates. Many of the more selfish older girls seemed to take Sallie’s letterless condition very much for granted but the Lakeville girls were decidedly sorry for her. At times, indeed, their tender hearts quite ached for Sallie.
But now Sallie was not the only sufferer for lack of mail. For weeks and weeks and weeks—eight of them to be exact—Mabel had had no letter from her father and mother who were in Germany. There had been postals from along the way and one announcing their arrival in Berlin and that was all.
Mabel possessed a dangerous imagination. It was now hard at work. She looked at poor old Abbie and at Sallie of the wistful eyes and shuddered. Was she, too, in danger of becoming a boarding school orphan? Would she have to wear faded old garments discarded and left behind by departed schoolmates? Would she grow to look just like Abbie—bent and hopeless—with a retreating chin and scant, hay-colored hair and a whining voice?
She asked these harrowing questions and many others of her sympathizing friends.
“Don’t worry,” soothed Henrietta. “It’s a good four months since I’ve heard a single word from my father. If he isn’t lost on one of his exploring expeditions in the heart of India or Africa or Asia, he’s been arrested for digging up somebody’s old tomb. That’s why I live with my grandmother, you know. Whenever Father hears of anything interesting to dig, no matter where it is, he just rushes off to dig it. And of course he couldn’t do that if he had me tied to his—his suspenders.”
“But you have your grandmother and so much money of your own that you wouldn’t need to be a school orphan like—like Abbie.”
“Mabel, before I’d let you be like Abbie—and you’d have to shrink an awful lot to do it and change color besides—I’d adopt you myself. It’s a promise. If anything should happen to your people, I’ll adopt you, so there! But don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen.”
While these assurances were cheering, Mabel still looked disconsolately at Abbie and at Sallie.
Mabel, with a long afternoon before her and tempted by the pleasant day, decided to take a walk in the grove. Perhaps she could find a hickory nut. On the veranda she overtook little Lillian Thwaite, obviously waiting for some one to walk with.
“Come on, Lill,” said Mabel. “Let’s go down to the grove.”
“Can’t,” returned Lillian, shrugging her small shoulders. “I’m going in to practise my duet.”
“Then why did you put your things on?” demanded Mabel, suspiciously.
“Just for instance,” returned Lillian, pertly.
Mabel discovered Grace Allen poking among the leaves in the grove.
“Hello, Grace!” said she, hopefully. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I’m going back to the house in a minute.”
“Come along with me—it’s nice out.”
“Don’t care to,” returned Grace, snippishly.
Mabel found the deserted grove rather gloomy and uninteresting. Beyond it the sunny prairie stretched for miles and miles with just one visible break—a small house with a tumble-down fence far off toward the south. It was out of bounds of course. Still, the girls had wandered out on the prairie and not one of the Rhodes family had said a word. It looked like an entirely safe and harmless place. Mabel looked speculatively at the faraway little house.
“I wonder if I couldn’t walk there and back before it gets dark. I’d have something to tell the girls. It would be fun to peek over that fence. Perhaps there are nuts under those trees by the gate. I wish Marjory and Bettie were here, but they had letters to read and this is Jean’s day at the gym. Maude’s too. Anyhow, I’m going a little way.”
It proved a splendid day for walking. Mabel’s brown eyes brightened, a fine color glowed in her cheeks and, for the moment, all her troubles evaporated. She even forgot her danger of becoming a boarding school orphan. Presently she looked back and was pleased to find herself quite a distance from Highland Hall. The school looked quite imposing, on top of its own little hill.
“I can get to that cottage quite easily,” said Mabel, trudging along cheerfully. “Perhaps there are chickens and things in the yard—I hope there isn’t a goat. Too bad the ground is all brown. There isn’t anything left to pick.”
The trees, when Mabel reached them, were apple trees; but all the apples were gone except a withered one. There were chickens in the yard; and a woman who was peering anxiously down the road that began at her gateway and wandered off toward the southwest.
“Say,” said she, catching sight of Mabel. “Would you mind coming in and staying with my children until Lizzie McCall gets here? She’s due any minute and I’ve got to get over to the trolley—I’m late now. I have a job cleaning cars over at the Centerville Station, this time every day, and Lizzie always stays with the kids—they’d tear the house down if I left them alone.”
“If you’re sure Lizzie is coming—”
“Oh, yes, she’s never missed yet. Just go in and see that they don’t meddle with the fire. Lizzie’ll be right along.”
The woman hastened away. She looked what she was, an honest working woman with many family cares. Mabel went inside. Four small children stared at Mabel, as she entered. A boy of four, two small girls evidently twins, aged three, and a toddling baby of perhaps a year and a half. A delightful family to take care of for ten minutes but certainly not the kind of family to leave for very long to its own devices; for the twins were reaching for the sugar bowl and the boy had already discovered the poker and was poking the fire.
“Let’s all watch out the window for Lizzie,” suggested Mabel. “Stand on these two chairs.”
Watching for Lizzie proved more of an occupation than Mabel had counted on. They watched and watched with all their eyes but no Lizzie appeared. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes. No Lizzie.
“Does Lizzie always come?” queried Mabel, now decidedly uneasy.
“Sure,” replied the small boy.
“Where is your father?”
“Haven’t any. Him all gone on choo choo cars. Far away.”
“Does your mother come home to supper?”
“No. Lizzie makes our supper. Lizzie puts Tommy to bed and Susy to bed and Sairy to bed and Jackie to bed.”
“Well,” remarked Mabel, crossly, “I wish she’d come right now and do it. I ought to be a mile from here this very minute. I shouldn’t have come in. And now I don’t know what to do. It isn’t right for you to be left by yourselves and it isn’t right for me to stay. Now what does anybody do in a case like that? I must be back by six o’clock; but I’d be wicked if I went away—and it’s awfully wrong of me not to go.”
“Don’t go,” wheedled Tommy. “You is nicer than Lizzie.”
“Nicer ’an ’Izzie,” echoed Susy.
“Nicer ’an ’Izzie,” echoed Sairy.
Mabel peered anxiously down the road. The days were short and already it was growing darker. For another half hour Mabel, pressing closer and closer to the window, watched the road. By that time it was really dark. There was a lamp with oil in it on the kitchen table; Mabel discovered matches on the shelf and managed to light it.
“What do you have for supper?” asked Mabel. “I suppose I’ll have to feed you.”
“Oatmeal,” said Tommy. “It’s in the kettle on the stove. And milk—in the cupboard. And bread.”
“What do you have for breakfast?”
“Oatmeal and milk and bread.”
“Where do you get them?”
“My muvver cooks ’em.”
“Hum,” said Mabel, investigating the cupboard, “there’s just about enough bread for two meals so I guess I’d better not eat very much if I have to stay to supper; but I hope I don’t.”
But she did. Lizzie still remained mysteriously absent; and before long the children began to beg for food. Mabel arranged their simple supper under Tommy’s directions and the friendly infants appeared pleased with their new nurse.
It was lonely in the solitary little house; but Mabel didn’t mind that as long as the children were awake. But very soon after supper they began to nod. Tommy, very sweet and drowsy himself, showed Mabel where the other little people were to sleep. The baby was fretful; he had eaten very little supper and now his heavy head felt hot against Mabel’s cheek as she rocked him to quiet his complaining little cry. Presently he was asleep, so she tucked him very tenderly into the old clothes-basket that Tommy assured her was the baby’s bed. Then the chubby, yawning twins were tucked into their crib, for which they were a tight fit; and in two minutes, they were asleep. After that, Tommy removed all his clothes except his shirt and climbed into the double bed.
“You can sleep by me,” invited Tommy, “until my muvver comes. Lizzie does sometimes, after she washes the dishes.”
That at least was something for a worried and lonely young person to do. Mabel washed the tin spoons and thick saucers and put them neatly away. By this time it was exceedingly dark outside.
“Even if Lizzie were to come,” said Mabel, “I’d be afraid to go home alone. Dear me, I suppose I’ll have to stay all night. By this time everybody will know I’ve been out of bounds and goodness only knows what Doctor Rhodes will say to me. But I’ll skip home as soon as it’s daylight and ask that nice fat cook to let me in at the kitchen door.”
The bed was not particularly inviting but at last Mabel locked the outer door and climbed in beside Tommy, who was fast asleep. She hoped that the baby was all right; he seemed restless and made little moaning noises and tossed uneasily in his basket. She was sure that she herself wouldn’t be able to sleep for a moment in that strange place, so far away from her own friends; but presently she was slumbering quite peacefully. It was broad daylight when she awoke.
And still no Lizzie.
“Tommy,” demanded Mabel, sitting up in bed, “when does your mother get home? Who cooks your breakfast every day?”
“My muvver does. Where is my muvver?”
“Well, that’s what I’d like to know. I suppose I could take you all over to the school—no, I couldn’t carry that heavy baby all that way even if the twins could manage to walk so far. If it was just you, Tommy, I know we could do it. And I don’t like that baby’s looks.”
“He’s getting another toof,” said Tommy, wisely.
The baby was sick, there was no doubt about that. There was barely enough food for breakfast, there was no doubt about that, either. To be sure there were potatoes, turnips and cabbages in the cellar. Thanks to her play-housekeeping in Dandelion Cottage, Mabel knew how to boil potatoes but she also knew that potatoes were hardly a proper food for a sick infant.
By noon the children were hungry so Mabel fed them potatoes and gave the baby a drink of water; but the supply of wood was getting low and Mabel could see no way of replenishing it.
“I suppose,” said she, bitterly, “that woman just wanted to get rid of all these children; and here I am! Four of them on my hands and nothing to eat. One of them sick and getting teeth! It’s just my luck. I’ll keep away from strange houses after this. I don’t believe there ever was a Lizzie. But we must have a fire—perhaps there’s something in that shed that will fit that stove.”
There wasn’t, but there was a large and clumsy baby carriage.
Mabel examined it hopefully.
Two hours later, at least half of the inmates of Highland Hall, greatly exercised over Mabel’s mysterious disappearance, beheld a strange sight. A twin baby carriage, containing three infants and propelled by a plump, sturdy and perspiring young person, was rolling up the broad walk toward the school. A small boy trudged along behind.
“It’s Mabel!” gasped Jean.
“It’s Mabel!” shrieked Marjory.
“Mabel, Mabel, Mabel,” cried Bettie, Maude and Jane Pool. Mabel’s friends rushed down to greet her. The girls who were not her friends and who had been saying unkind things about her hung back; but they looked and listened.
“We might have known,” said Bettie, “that she’d bring something home with her—she always does.”
“But this time,” laughed Jean, “she’s outdone herself.”
Doctor Rhodes, stern and disapproving, eyed Mabel, coldly. To say the least it was unusual for a pupil to vanish for twenty-four hours and then turn up unexpectedly with a family of four. It certainly needed explaining.
Mabel, however, was too much out of breath to do any explaining. She beamed at the girls—it was pleasant to see them again after that long, anxious absence—and then glanced at Doctor Rhodes.
Horrors! How was anybody to explain things to a man who glared like that! Mabel stood still, her smile frozen on her plump, perspiring countenance.
“Leave those children right where they are,” said Doctor Rhodes, sternly, “and go into my office. I want to know what this conduct means.”
“Ye—yes, Sir,” faltered Mabel, toiling up the steps. Marjory skipped along beside her, to impart a bit of news.
“We missed you at supper time,” breathed Marjory, in an undertone; “but Doctor Rhodes didn’t know until about an hour ago that you were lost. We knew you so we were sure you’d do some queer thing like this and would get home all right if we just gave you a chance, so we kept still. If you’d only come just a little sooner we could have kept the secret. Miss Woodruff got after us and found out. I must skip, now—he’s coming.”
“Now,” demanded Doctor Rhodes, “where have you been?”
“I went for a walk,” said Mabel, dropping into the chair that was reserved for culprits. “I—I’ve always had the habit of bringing things home with me—cats, dogs and once an Indian baby. But—but this is the worst I’ve done yet.”
Doctor Rhodes turned suddenly to look out the window. The disappearance of a pupil from the school was a serious matter; but there was something about Mabel’s rueful countenance, her dejected attitude and her apologetic tone that was provocative of laughter.
“There was a woman,” pursued Mabel, earnestly, “and she said there was a Lizzie. I believed her at first but now I don’t. She asked me to stay with her children until Lizzie came and Lizzie didn’t come. I had to stay. It wasn’t safe to leave them with a fire in the stove. Today there wasn’t any fresh milk for the baby and I couldn’t split the wood. But there was a twin baby carriage and it’s taken us more than two hours to get here.”
“Where was that house? In the village?”
“Oh, no,” returned Mabel, wearily, waving her hand toward the south. “Way over that way across the prairie.”
“What! that small house that we can just see from the upper veranda? What were you doing away over there?”
“Just taking a walk—I thought I’d be back by six. I knew I was going pretty far; but my feet just kept going.”