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.”