THE SECOND DEGREE
"My patience, what a world of trouble this is!" sighed Betty to herself,
but aloud she said cheerily: "What's the matter with Norma?"
Norma sat up, mopping her eyes.
"Oh, Betty," she choked, "I don't believe Alice and I can come back
after Christmas! They've had a fire in Glenside and a house dad owns
there burned. He hasn't a cent of insurance, and the mortgagee takes
the ground. So that's the rental right out of our income. Besides,
grandma has had an operation on her eyes and she has to spend weeks in
an expensive Philadelphia hospital. Even with the small fees the
surgeons charge because of dad, the board will amount to more than he
can afford to pay. Alice and I ought to be learning stenography or
something useful."
"Well, now, your father would say," suggested Betty, with determined
optimism, "that the Christmas vacation is too far off to make any plans
about what you're going to do afterward. You know Bobby Littell has set
her heart on you and Alice spending the recess with them in Washington.
Anyway, lots of things can turn up before Christmas, Norma--even the
treasure!"
Norma tried to smile.
"I dream about that chasm nearly every night," she said. "Sometimes I
think the Indians came back and got the stuff, Betty. They're so clever
about climbing, and I know they wouldn't easily give up."
"Nonsense!" chided Betty. "The treasure is there, and we've just got to
think up a way to get it out. At all costs you mustn't cry yourself sick
about the future--you'll spoil all the fun awaiting you in the weeks
before Christmas. And you know you can't study as well when you're
depressed, and, goodness knows! one has to study at Shadyside."
"I've a headache now," confessed Norma, pushing her tumbled hair out
of her eyes. "I can't go down to dinner--I'm a perfect sight. There's
the bell!"
"Just lie down and try to rest," advised Betty, smoothing the tangled
covers with a deft hand. "I'll bring you up some supper on a tray. Aunt
Nancy thinks you're an angel on general principles, and she has a special
soft spot in her heart for you because her mother used to cook for your
grandmother. Come on, Alice, we'll turn the light out and let her rest
her eyes."
"I do wish some one would think up a way to get those pearls and the
gold," fretted Betty, turning restlessly on her pillow that night. "If
Norma and Alice are ever going to be well-off now is the time. When
they're so old they can't walk, money won't do 'em any good!"
Which showed that Betty, for all her sound sense, was still a little
girl. Very old ladies, who can not walk, certainly need money to make
them comfortable and keep them so.
The next night was Friday, and Betty welcomed the prospect of the second
degree necessary to stamp the freshmen as full-fledged members of the
Mysterious For. The week had been noticeably tinged with indigo for at
least two of Betty's friends, and she hoped the initiation might take
their minds from their troubles.
The second degree, it was whispered about among the girls, was bound to
be a "hummer."
"They say it's a test of your character," said Bobby, with a shiver.
"Somehow, Betty, my character oozes out of my shoes when it knows it
should be prancing up to the firing line."
"I guess you imagine that," smiled Betty. "Speak sternly to it, Bobby,
and explain that funking is out of the question."
However, more girls than Bobby found it necessary to clutch at their
oozing courage when, upon assembling in the large hall, the lights
suddenly went out. In the shadows, four white veiled figures were seen
slowly to mount the platform.
"To-night," said one of them, stretching out a long arm and pointing
toward the fascinated and expectant audience, "we are your fates! You
have come to the final tests. We have no choice in these tests, nor have
you. You are to come forward, one at a time, and take a slip from this
basket here on the table. Go directly to your room after drawing your
slip, and there open it and follow the directions explicitly. Come to the
platform in the order in which you are seated, please."
The lights did not come on, and one by one the girls stumbled up the
steps to the platform, felt around in the basket, and drew a slip. Then
they hurried away to their rooms to see what was to happen next.
Bobby and Betty could hardly wait to open their notes, and before they
had them fairly digested, Frances and Libbie and Constance and Louise and
the Guerin girls were crowding in to compare notes.
"I have to go and ask Miss Prettyman if I may telephone to Salsette
Academy and ask for a lost-and-found notice on their bulletin board,"
wailed Bobby. "I'm supposed to have lost a pair of gloves at the last
football game. I always have the worst luck! Can't you imagine how Miss
Prettyman will lecture me? She'll say that at my age I ought to have
something in my head besides excuses to talk to the boys!"
The girls laughed, recognizing the ring of prophecy in Bobby's speech.
"That's nothing--I'm to row Dora Estabrooke twice around the lake,"
mourned Louise. "She weighs two hundred, if she weighs a pound. Thank
goodness, I don't have to do it to-night."
Norma was instructed to walk three times around the cellar, chanting
"Little Boy Blue" before ten o'clock that night. Frances Martin, to her
horror, was enjoined to produce six live angle worms the following
morning--"and you know I despise the wiggling things," she wailed. Alice
Guerin, the silent member of the octette, was condemned to recite "The
Children's Hour" in the dining room "between cereal and eggs." And
Constance Howard was told she must add up an unbelievably long column of
figures and present the correct answer within half an hour. Constance's
_bête noir_ was figures, and already these long columns danced dizzily
before her eyes.
"You needn't tell me that chance made such canny selections," observed
Betty. "One of those girls manipulated the right notes into our hands.
Libbie, what does yours say?"
Libbie handed her slip of paper to Betty without a word.
"Go to bed at once," the latter read aloud.
There was a gale of laughter. Libbie, the curious, who dearly loved to
hear and see, to be sent off to bed in the middle of the most wildly
exciting night they had known in weeks!
"Hurry," admonished Bobby. "You're disobeying by staying up this long.
Where's your character, Libbie?"
Libbie scowled, but departed, grumbling that she didn't see why she
couldn't stay up and watch Norma walk down in the cellar.
"Mine is the most spooky," said Betty, when the door had closed behind
Libbie. "Listen--I'm to climb the water tower at midnight and leave this
card there to show I have complied."
She held out a little plain white card in a green envelope.
"Hark! was that somebody at the door?" asked Bobby, and she ran over to
it lightly and jerked it open.
The corridor was empty.
"We're all nervous," remarked Betty lightly. "I'll set the alarm for
eleven-forty-five and put the clock under my pillow so Miss Lacey won't
hear it. I'll lie down all dressed, and then I won't have to use a light.
She might see that through the transom."
"Don't you want some of us to go with you?" asked Constance. "We needn't
go up into the tower, if you say not. But at least we could go that far
with you; you might fall off the roof."
"No, please, I'd rather go alone," said Betty firmly. "It's a test, you
see, and the idea isn't to make it easy. I'll be all right, and in the
morning the girls will find the card and know I didn't flunk."
After the girls had gone away to their own rooms the clock was set for a
quarter of twelve, but Betty and Bobby decided that they might as well
stay awake till midnight. They would lie down on their beds--Betty
insisted that Bobby should undress and go to bed "right"--and wait for
the time to come. Within twenty minutes they were both sound asleep.
The muffled whir of her alarm clock awakened Betty. For a moment she was
dazed, then recollection cleared her mind. She slipped to the floor
without waking Bobby and softly tiptoed from the room.
A dim light burned in the corridor, and Betty knew the way to the water
tower. To reach it, one had to mount to the roof of the dormitory
building. Betty experienced a little difficulty with the obstinate catch
of the scuttle cover, but she finally mastered it and stepped out on the
tarred graveled roof. The water tower, a huge tank on an iron framework,
had a little enclosed room built directly under it reached by an iron
ladder. Here the engineer kept various plumbing tools. It was in this
room that Betty was to leave the card.
The night wind blew damp and keen, and the stars overhead seemed very far
away. Betty had no sense of fear as she began to climb, mounting slowly
and feeling for each step with her hands. The friendly dark shut in
around her and somewhere in the distance a train whistle tooted shrilly.
She knew she had reached the last step when her hands encountered wood,
and she felt about till she touched the knob of the door. It opened at
her touch and she pulled herself in over the sill.
"Now the card," she whispered, feeling in her pocket.
A gust of wind fanned her cheek and something clicked.
The door had blown shut!