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.