West Haven High School, Miss Gray, the Principal, had often said, had
all the merits of a public and private school combined. It was more
thorough than a private school and the teachers were more in touch with
the pupils than is usual at a public school. Miss Gray herself was
deeply interested in the welfare of her girls and studied carefully the
ability and temperament of each one.
When, therefore, a strange and very terrible complaint was made to her
one morning about one of her school girls, she was too shocked to reason
intelligently about it, and ended by dismissing the complainants quietly
from her private office until she sent for them again.
Exactly what the complaint was no one knew except those who had made it.
It was kept a careful secret. But in school rumors arise in the most
subtle way. They are whispered about behind doors at recess; written on
the margins of text books in class and hastily rubbed out; vaguely
hinted at here and there until they spread from room to room and class
to class and gradually the whole school is bursting with the news. And
the poor victim may all this time be entirely unconscious that she is
the very centre of a seething, boiling pot of gossip.
This is how the present rumor started in West Haven High School:
One afternoon when the last gong had sounded the sophomore class
gathered in the locker room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers
were only so in name. There had never been any keys to them, because
there had never been any need to keep belongings under lock and key in
West Haven High School, where most of the pupils had known each other
all their lives.
On this particular afternoon, every incident of which our four friends
will remember as long as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass, as
usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent over an automobile map,
were making plans for a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her
Latin for the next day. It was that lingering, lazy time after school is
over, which all school girls know.
Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung open the door of her locker,
next to that of Belle Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in looking
at herself in her own private mirror, hung on the inside of her locker
door.
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" exclaimed Fannie Alta, with a very excited and
strange manner. "I have lost something. Something which my mamma gave me
to keep for her. What shall I do? What shall I do?"
"Why, what was it, Fannie?" asked the other girls, gathering around her
sympathetically. "Let us help you find it."
"Oh, oh, it is terrible!" cried the young Spanish girl, wringing her
hands and weeping in her handkerchief alternately. "What shall I do?
What shall I do?"
"Was it money you lost?" asked Billie, in her usual rather abrupt
manner.
"Yes, yes; how did you know?"
"I didn't know, I guessed," answered Billie.
"Did you leave it in your locker?" some one else asked.
"Yes, yes. I left it there at noon to-day. Twenty dollars my mamma gave
to me to keep for her. Oh, is it not terrible? She will eat me with her
anger."
Billie could hardly keep the corners of her mouth from curving with an
irrepressible smile when she remembered those two front tusks of Mme.
Alta's, which seemed to be uncovered, ready for work at any moment.
"Are you sure it is not there still?" asked Elinor quietly. "I happened
to look up when you came into the room. You simply flung open your
locker door and then began to cry. Why don't you look in your pockets
before you decide that you have lost the money?"
Fannie flashed an angry glance at Elinor.
"How did you know that I had not looked before; that I have not looked
twice, many times?"
"I didn't," answered Elinor. "Have you?"
Fannie did not reply and from that moment she and Elinor disliked each
other intensely.
Then the girls began looking carefully about the room.
"I feel as if I had it hidden about me," said Nancy, giggling, as she
helped in the search.
The others laughed, too, which somewhat relieved the situation. Nothing
is more uncomfortable than for money to be lost mysteriously in a
company of people.
"We do look as guilty as the forty thieves," ejaculated Rosomond McLane,
a fat, funny girl, who was popular with the whole class.
No one was more active in the search than Belle Rogers. She shook
Fannie's text books violently and scattered the papers about, to
Fannie's intense annoyance. She felt in Fannie's pockets, examined the
lining of her hat, and made herself so officious and numerous that
Fannie herself exclaimed with much irritation:
"Please do not, Belle. You know it is not there."
Only Elinor sat quietly on the window sill watching the search, with
just the faintest shadow of scornful incredulity on her handsome face.
"Elinor Butler, do you believe I have been telling a falsehood?" Fannie
finally exclaimed in exasperation.
"What a little spitfire you are, Fannie," answered Elinor. "Just because
I don't choose to grovel on the floor looking for your money. I can help
you quite as much by thinking, and I am thinking very hard, I can assure
you."
At last the search was abandoned. The pocketbook containing the money
could not be found, and the young girls, swinging their book
straps,--bags were too childish for High School girls,--strolled up the
street in groups discussing the strange disappearance of Fannie's twenty
dollars.
In the meantime, the Motor Maids, laughing and talking together, tossed
their books into the red car and then climbed in themselves. Somehow,
Fannie's loss did not seem very real. Billie had cranked up the machine
and was about to back out when Fannie's voice called from the locker
room:
"Wait! Stop!"
"Well, you see we haven't gone yet," answered Elinor severely.
"Elinor, you are so hard on Fannie Alta. I'm sorry for her," said Mary.
"Mother wouldn't bite me if I lost twenty dollars, but I'd hate to lose
it just the same."
"I didn't mean to be hard on her," answered Elinor, "but my instincts
tell me not to trust her."
"When did they tell you, Elinor?" laughed Billie.
Elinor's instincts were a great joke to her three devoted friends. But
the appearance of Fannie running breathlessly, with Belle following at a
dignified pace, interrupted Elinor's invariable reply to jests about her
instincts: "You know they are never wrong."
"What is the matter now, Fannie?" asked Billie, who was standing in the
front of her car, her arms folded, like a captain on the hurricane deck
of his ship.
[Illustration: "Get out of the road," cried Billie, backing recklessly
out of the shed and whizzing out of the gate at full speed.]
"Would you mind----" Fannie stammered. "I mean--I think I have a right
to ask--I want you to look in your pockets. I believe----" she
continued, getting bolder every moment. "I am sure that one of you will
find my pocketbook----"
Billie's frank, candid face flushed as scarlet as her motor car, while
the color left Elinor's cheeks as white as death. Nancy gave a little
frightened giggle, and Mary Price neither flushed nor turned white, but
looked quietly on.
"Really, Fannie," spoke Elinor, "you are not in the lawless South
American country you came from, whatever it is. You are among decent
people, not thieves, and perhaps you had better remember that hereafter.
Start on, Billie," she commanded, sitting as erect as a queen at her own
coronation.
"But I insist!" screamed Fannie.
"She has a right," put in Belle.
"Get out of the road," cried Billie, backing recklessly out of the shed,
turning with a wide, flourishing curve and whizzing out of the gate at
full speed.
"Well, of all the insolence," cried Elinor. "What does she mean and how
does she dare----" her voice choked with indignation.
"Don't you think it was Belle Rogers who put her up to it out of
revenge?" suggested Mary.
"If it was, I can't see what she had to gain by it," said Billie.
"Elinor sailed into them and we nearly sailed over them. It seems to me
we had a good deal the best of it."
Billie dropped the girls at their homes, as she was in the habit of
doing every afternoon after school, and whirled up Cliff Street to the
old Campbell homestead. On the way she passed Belle Rogers, who also
lived in that fashionable section, but she did not ask her to get in and
ride up the hill. Billie had a frank, open nature, but with her whole
soul she distrusted that pink and white doll-baby face and those
innocent china blue eyes.
In the meantime Mary had taken off her rather threadbare little jacket
and hung it in the closet. Her mother was resting on the couch. She
looked pale and tired that day, and Mary walked softly so as not to
disturb her. Slipping off her mittens, she thrust them into her coat
pocket. Her fingers encountered something and she pulled out a flat,
foreign-looking pocketbook. Mary's face turned white and she leaned
against the wall of the closet and closed her eyes.
"They must have put it in my pocket," she whispered. "What shall I do?"
"Mary, dearest," called her mother.
"Yes, mother," she answered, quietly slipping the purse into the pocket
again. "I won't tell her now," she thought. "She is worried enough
already." And when presently she kissed her mother, no one could have
told that the young girl was more frightened than she had ever been in
all her lifetime.
The next morning Mary hurried to school without waiting for Billie and
her car. She had something to study, she said. But Fannie was there
before her, waiting in the locker room. Mary tried to calm her beating
heart as she looked steadily at the other girl. Then, with a sudden
resolution, she marched straight up to Fannie, and thrust the pocketbook
into her hand.
"You put this in my pocket," she said. "I don't know what you have
against me, or what I ever did to you, but if you ever do it again, I
shall go straight to Miss Gray."
Fannie took the pocketbook without a word, and after that a very
different version of the story got out. Finally it reached Miss Gray's
ears.
But the most serious thing of all was that things began disappearing
every day out of the girls' lockers.