Marjory was still more or less in disgrace the day that Doctor Rhodes announced that at last he had secured a new French teacher to take Madame Bolande’s place.
“Her name is—Ah! I’ve forgotten it. No, Miss—er—Miss Flower. That’s it. Miss Flower. She is not a French woman but comes very well recommended. It has been difficult at this particular time to find exactly the right person; but I think you will all be pleased.”
Doctor Rhodes was to prove a better prophet than he suspected. When the time came, some of the girls were more than pleased.
“Flower,” whispered irrepressible Maude, into a convenient ear. “She must be a regular daisy.”
“Perhaps she’s a Texas sunflower,” returned Victoria.
That afternoon, of course, all the Highland Hall girls, bristling with curiosity, congregated on the veranda to watch for the station hack.
“I’m mighty glad to give up my job,” said Henrietta, pausing near one of the many groups. “Eighty minutes of hard labor a day are quite a strain. That last Theolog was used up in less than a week and all my skirt bands are getting loose—all that hard labor with French verbs. I hope Miss Flower is an improvement on Madame Bolande.”
“Madame Bolande is the best French teacher I’ve had,” said Gladys de Milligan, rather pointedly. “I haven’t learned a thing since she left.”
“Of course, if you like that kind,” retorted Henrietta. “Come on, Hazel. Let’s stand on the railing and see if the old ’bus is on the way. I don’t have to be dignified any more.”
Ten minutes later, a young woman descended from the timeworn hack. As she paid the driver, she stood in a patch of sunlight. From the veranda she was plainly visible and rather more than sixty eager young eyes, with no intention of rudeness on their owners’ part, took in every detail of the new teacher’s neat costume and dwelt pleasurably on her very attractive countenance. But suddenly there was a most remarkable commotion on that veranda. Five girls were scrambling down the steps, regardless of seated schoolmates, and five joyful voices were shrieking:
“It’s Miss Blossom! It is! It is! It’s our Miss Blossom! Our own Miss Blossom!”
“And this,” cried Mabel, triumphantly, “is the Flower we get!”
Much to the new teacher’s surprise and bewilderment, she was seized and hugged and kissed and squeezed by five excited girls.
“Well, I declare,” said she, when she could get a good look at them. “I wondered if this school always welcomed new teachers this way. If it isn’t Bettie, and Jean and Marjory and Henrietta and Mabel! Isn’t this great. And I thought I was going to be all alone among strangers. This is certainly too good to be true. Jean, you look just the same and good enough to eat. Bettie, you’re taller and plumper too—you’re looking fine. Marjory, you little mite; you aren’t as big as you were the last time I saw you—are they abusing you at this place? Here’s Henrietta as lovely as ever—but you’re pale, my dear. And Mabel—Why, Mabel, I do believe you’re taller—and thinner. And aren’t you good looking! But you all look as sweet as peaches and cream to me.”
“If we’d all picked out the person that we wanted most to come to this place,” declared Mabel earnestly, “that person would have been you.”
Every one liked Miss Blossom, the pleasant young woman who had spent a summer in Lakeville and had played in Dandelion Cottage with Jean, Bettie, Marjory and Mabel; and had later paid them a visit at Pete’s Patch, where she had met pretty Henrietta.
Never was teacher more popular. Before long, almost every girl in the school was completely in love with the charming young woman. And now, some of the girls who had listened most credulously to Gladys’s unpleasant tales about the Lakeville children, began, little by little, to doubt these tales. Miss Blossom was so very attractive, so genuinely good, so admirable in every way, that it couldn’t be possible that she would like those four Michigan girls if Laura’s tales were entirely true. And there was Henrietta, too, evidently firm in her belief in Marjory’s honesty. Surely if those two really particular persons considered Marjory a nice child, perhaps she wasn’t as black as she appeared to be painted.
The next dancing evening, Victoria Webster delighted Marjory by inviting her to two-step and Debbie Clark asked her for a waltz.
One night, almost a week after the new teacher’s arrival, Jean and Bettie were spending an evening in Miss Blossom’s own room. They had slipped away from the West Corridor without telling the other Lakeville girls where they were going. They appeared to have some weighty matter on their minds and were evidently not quite at ease.
“We want to tell you something,” explained Jean, fidgeting a little in her chair. “It’s a long story and some of it is quite horrid; but we need your help.”
“We wanted to come sooner,” added Bettie, “but we thought we ought not to bother you until you were settled and a little bit used to the school.”
“Very thoughtful of you,” assured Miss Blossom. “But now we have a long evening before us and I’m ready to listen with all my ears.”
So Jean, with some help from Bettie, told about the various thefts of money and other things, about Marjory and the blue beads, about Sallie and the stolen purse under her pincushion and the handkerchief full of purloined articles in Marjory’s drawer. About Laura and her mean little way of saying unpleasant things about the Lakeville girls.
And then they told Miss Blossom what they had been careful to mention to no one else. They recounted their past experience with Laura in Lakeville; told how she had maliciously destroyed the wonderful vine that grew in their garden; and how now she had stolen the priceless treasures from their precious treasure boxes. How she had taken even the precious handkerchiefs that Miss Blossom herself had embroidered for the girls.
“Miss Blossom,” confessed Jean, who was obviously not enjoying her task, “we haven’t known what we ought to do. We thought, if Laura had changed for the better, that it wouldn’t be right for us to tell that she had changed her name and done things to her hair; and that when we knew her in Lakeville, she was common and dishonest and all that. When she came here she seemed improved in sort of a way; even if it wasn’t exactly a way we liked. And of course we didn’t want to be unfair to her in any way or to do anything that wasn’t kind. We couldn’t like her; but we were perfectly decent to her. And even now, we may be mistaken. We may be wronging her; but we can’t help thinking—Well, here is this thing about Marjory and that other thing about Sallie—”
“Those pocketbooks,” said Bettie, “in their two rooms. Marjory and I are almost sure that one person did that.”
“I think so too,” said Jean. “But I’ve thought and thought and thought; but I just didn’t know what I ought to do about it—or if I really ought to do anything. But there is poor Marjory getting thinner and thinner and our poor sweet Sallie—we do love Sallie, every one of us—with no people of her own to take her part. It does seem as if something ought to be done.”
“Don’t worry about it any more,” said Miss Blossom, with a wonderfully soothing hand on Jean’s troubled brow. “Something is going to be done. Our Marjory is going to hold her head up again and our Sallie is going to be proved honest; but you don’t need to think about it for another minute. You did perfectly right in coming to me and I’m glad you came. But now you must run along to bed—there’s the nine o’clock bell. Good night and pleasant dreams to both of you.”
Miss Blossom spent the next half hour with the Rhodes family. She told them what she knew of the Lakeville girls and of Gladys de Milligan, who had once lived in Lakeville as plain Laura Milligan.
“A silly girl with a foolish mother,” commented Doctor Rhodes. “Yet, strangely enough, there is no pupil in this school who has higher marks in her studies or for general deportment than this overdressed Milligan girl.”
“And I’m sure,” said Mrs. Henry, with a twinkle in her blue eye, “that Gladys would come first in any gum chewing contest.”