After her third day of solitary confinement, Maude promised to apologize properly to Miss Woodruff the next morning, immediately after prayers.
“Miss Woodruff,” said Maude, standing very slim and straight at her own desk in the Assembly room, “I apologize for the things I did to your—your clothes the other night. I’m sorry it was necessary to do them.”
“That will do,” said Dr. Rhodes, raising his hand, hastily—for there was no knowing how far irrepressible Maude might go, with all those other girls ready to applaud. “I’m sure Miss Woodruff accepts your apology.”
“I do,” replied Miss Woodruff, coldly, “but I should also like to have my silver cardcase returned at once. I have always kept it on the right hand side of my dresser, exactly six inches from my pincushion.”
“Sacré bleu! Quel précision!” breathed untidy Madame Bolande.
“When I went to your closet to get that red—well, that red garment,” replied Maude, “I noticed that the top of your dresser was perfectly neat and tidy. But I didn’t see any cardcase. It might have been there but I didn’t notice it. I certainly didn’t take it.”
“Very well,” said Miss Woodruff. “You may now be seated. Classes please.”
Mabel, the other culprit, was now behaving very well indeed. She was learning her lessons, and, under the patient tuition of Miss Emily Rhodes, was improving her naturally untidy penmanship. She was also meekly, conscientiously and courageously going without dessert; and never—it seemed to always hungry Mabel—had there been so very many entrancing varieties of pie, so many choice puddings; and, of all weeks of the year, that was the one that the fat cook chose for the introduction of a brand new custardy affair that every one of the girls declared “simply scrumptious.”
Usually, there was much swapping of food at meal time. Grace Allen didn’t like butter but Ruth Dennis did; and was glad to give her tapioca pudding to Grace in exchange for Grace’s daily butter. Augusta disliked celery but adored pickles so she and Cora carried on an equally gratifying exchange. Mabel always traded her lima beans for Alice Bailey’s cocoanut pie—Alice hated cocoanut—and of course, during that dessertless week Mabel was obliged to refuse not only her own pie but Alice’s. But everybody liked the new custard.
“Taste mine,” tempted little Jane Pool. “It’s just licking good. Come on, nobody’s looking.”
“No,” sighed Mabel, “it wouldn’t be honest. I said I’d go without so I’ll go all the way—one week can’t last forever.”
“Never mind, Mabel,” comforted Maude, “I’ll ask Nora to make this kind often next week and I’ll give you my share just once so you can catch up. Besides, I owe you that much—I led you into this scrape, you know.”
Going without dessert, however, was a small trouble compared with mysteriously losing two full grown parents. Mabel’s were still missing. As she had no address except Berlin, she wasn’t at all sure that her own letters were reaching them. She and each of the other Lakeville girls had had several brief, boyish letters from their friend and fellow-camper, Laddie Lombard, the shipwrecked boy they had rescued at Pete’s Patch; but from her parents, not a word for so many weeks that it made Mabel shiver to count them.
Her thoughts, nowadays, were gloomy ones. What if she had to stay at Highland Hall until she was faded and forty like poor old Abbie. What if her skirts kept getting shorter and shorter (or what was more likely, narrower and narrower) like Cora’s. What if her middy blouses faded and frayed like Sallie’s, with no prospects of new ones. And what if she never saw her dear parents again—that was the worst thought of all. Her plump easy-going mother, her kind, pleasant father.
Yes, that was the worst thought of all. It weighed Mabel down. No matter what else she might be doing at the moment, Mabel couldn’t quite escape from the steadily increasing weight of that puzzling trouble.
“I’d give all four of my letters from Laddie,” said Mabel, wistfully, “for just a postal card with one little word on it from my mother.”
“Well,” declared Gladys de Milligan, who also was watching the mail bag, expectantly, “if I had a daughter as clumsy as you are I’d chuck her into a boarding school and leave her there forever. I’d be glad to forget about her.”
“Anyhow,” declared Mabel, crossly, “you don’t need to chew gum in my ear, even if you would be that kind of a mother.”
The Lakeville girls tried to cheer troubled Mabel but she could see that they, too, were becoming anxious. Indeed, Bettie had secretly written to Mr. Black about it. Mr. Black, Bettie firmly believed, could fix anything.
“My goodness!” said Cora, one evening, when the girls were waiting for Henrietta to come and tell them ghost stories on the spooky front stairs, “here are the Christmas holidays coming right along and I don’t know what I’m ever going to do. I’ve written and written to my people about the way I’m growing—told ’em I was seven feet tall if I was an inch—and they won’t believe me. They think I’m exaggerating! Here I am, growing a mile a minute; but my clothes, alas! are standing still. I’m going home with Maude, to visit her perfectly scrumptious family, and I haven’t one single dud that’s big enough either lengthwise or sidewise.”
“Didn’t the photographs work?” asked Helen Miller. For the Miller girls, at Cora’s request, had taken a number of snapshots of the growing girl to be sent to her doubting parents. Perhaps Cora had grown a little at the very moment in which she was snapped. At any rate the pictures were slightly hazy as to outline; yet, to the girls, they looked convincingly like Cora.
“No,” returned Cora, mournfully. “They didn’t believe that it was a picture of me.”
“What are you going to try next?” asked little Jane Pool.
“Nothing. I’ve given up. I’ve half a mind to stay right here for the holidays.”
“Nonsense!” said Maude. “You can wear my clothes—I’ve several things that are too big for me—that new navy blue taffeta, for instance.”
“I couldn’t do that,” said Cora, blushing until her freckles disappeared. “Your people would know they were yours. I’d feel ashamed.”
“Yes, that wouldn’t do,” agreed Jean.
“I know what to do,” said Henrietta, who had arrived and was perched on the substantial newel post. “We’ll all lend you things. You can take that new white blouse of mine—it will have to shrink before I can wear it.”
“I’ll lend you my pleated skirt,” said Helen Miller, “you have it most of the time, anyway.”
“I have a petticoat that would go with it,” said Dorothy.
“Please—please take my new umbrella,” pleaded little Jane Pool, earnestly. “I want to lend you something and that’s the only thing I have that’s big enough.”
“You’re a bunch of darlings,” said Cora, hugging them all by turns, “and I’ll be glad to borrow your things.”
“Of course it’s too late to be of any use for vacation,” said Jean, “but I have an idea. Why don’t you ask Doctor Rhodes to write to your people and tell them the horrible truth about your inches. Have Mrs. Henry Rhodes measure you. Figures, you know, never—well, exaggerate. They may believe Doctor Rhodes.”
“Angel child!” cried Cora, “I’ll do just that. You’ve found the answer.”
Perhaps Jean had, for Doctor Rhodes, both amused and impressed by Cora’s remarkable plight, did write to her people and the response was a large box that arrived soon after Cora returned from Maude’s.
“And my goodness!” said exaggerating Cora, “there are tucks a mile wide and hems a mile deep and a whole acre of cloth in everything.”
Three days after the evening on the stairs, the girls were all in the school room when Sallie, a little late, came in with the mail bag. There was a pleasing plumpness about the bag that day; and, as usual, all the girls crowded into the space just below the rostrum, so that Sallie, the post girl, looked down upon a small sea of eager, upturned faces.
Sallie reached into the bag, as was her habit, and pulled out a letter.
“Miss Eleanor Pratt,” she read. One of the Seniors accepted it, calmly.
“Miss Anne Blodgett, Miss Isabelle Carew, Miss Ruth Dennis, Miss Debbie Clark, Miss Hazel Benton, Miss Gladys de Milligan, Miss Bettie Tucker, Miss Augusta Lemon, Miss Beatrice Holmes—” Another Senior strolled leisurely forward and condescended to accept a letter. Really, those older girls were annoying; they were so blasé about their mail.
“Miss Mabel Bennett,” called Sallie, in her clear, strong voice.
Mabel seized her letter and waved it, gleefully. “It’s from Mother!” she cried. “Hip, Hip, Hooray!” (There was nothing blasé about Mabel.)
Sallie, beaming sympathetically, pulled another letter from the bag.
“Miss Mabel Bennett,” she announced.
“It’s from Mother,” Mabel shrieked again.
But when the third letter proved to be Mabel’s, too, Mabel was too breathless with excitement to do more than gasp. When she had received five letters and four postal cards and a package containing thick, remarkably substantial German handkerchiefs, one for herself and one for each of her Lakeville friends, it was almost a relief to hear Sallie read a different name; for even the lofty Seniors were staring at her in astonishment.
“It wasn’t my people that were lost,” explained Mabel, after she had read all this accumulation of mail. “For quite a long time Mother mailed her letters in an old post-box that wasn’t used any more for that purpose. She didn’t understand enough German when somebody told her that wasn’t the right one. But Father found out about it; and, after a long time, they succeeded in getting the German postmaster to open the old box and send her letters. So I’m not an orphan after all. And this week I’m going to buy something lovely with every penny of my thirty cents for Sallie, because she is.”