The next morning, during school hours, Mrs. Rhodes and Mrs. Henry Rhodes searched Laura’s room. There was nothing in it that did not belong to either Laura or her roommate Victoria Webster. Under the cover on the dresser top they found Laura’s trunk key and carried it to the attic trunk room.
There was nothing unusual about the tray of Laura’s trunk except the large hole that Mabel had made by tumbling into it. But when the tray was lifted out and several layers of clothing were removed, it looked very much as if all the mysteries were solved. A fat little roll of banknotes, tied up neatly with a pink ribbon, a candy box full of silver coins, several pairs of silk stockings marked with the names of the three Seniors, every article of jewelry that had been reported missing, as well as some others that the careless owners had not yet missed.
It looked very much as if all the mysteries were solved
“My opera glasses!” exclaimed Mrs. Henry.
“My real lace collar!” cried Mrs. Rhodes. “I suppose this is Gladys’s trunk?”
“Oh, certainly. Can’t you smell the perfume? Nobody else uses this kind. Besides, her name is on the outside.”
“Yes, that’s right. Now, I wonder what we’d better do about this.”
“We’ll have to talk it over with Father. I’m afraid there’s no doubt this time.”
“I’m sure there isn’t,” returned Mrs. Rhodes. “It’s the de Milligan girl without question. I don’t know why I didn’t suspect her sooner.”
“Well, I didn’t,” said Mrs. Henry. “And she was right in my own corridor. I’m awfully sorry about all this.”
“I’d have been sorrier,” returned the older woman, grimly, “if it had been any other girl. I never did like this one.”
When Laura was called into Doctor Rhodes’s office and invited to explain how all those things had found their way into her trunk, she appeared to be very much surprised. She was sure she didn’t know. She said she supposed that Sallie Dickinson had put them there, or if not Sallie, one of the maids; or possibly Marjory Vale. Marjory was ever a deceitful child, much given to thievery. She herself had often warned the other girls against Marjory.
Laura, standing with her back against the wall, seemed quite calm and unconcerned, except that she shifted her chewing gum from side to side with greater frequency than usual.
Doctor Rhodes had rather a terrible eye. Two of them in fact. He fixed them both on Laura’s unperturbed countenance and gazed so very sternly at her that presently Laura began to quail. She gulped suddenly and swallowed her gum. And then she began to stammer excuses.
She liked pretty things. She couldn’t resist taking things when it was so easy to do it. Her fingers liked to take things. She didn’t always want what she had taken. Sometimes she wished afterwards that she hadn’t taken them. Her father was stingy and wouldn’t give her expensive trinkets. Her mother would but didn’t have the money. Her mother wanted her to have nice things.
When did she take the things? Oh, at night sometimes. Her roommate, Victoria Webster, slept like a log and didn’t miss her if she left the room. Or daytimes, by getting upstairs ahead of the other girls it was easy enough to dash into a room, grab a bracelet or a pin left carelessly about and hide it in her pocket. There were plenty of chances like that, when girls were so heedless with their belongings. Really, it was the girls’ own fault much more than hers. Yes, she had put those beads in Marjory’s pocket while the dress was on Marjory’s bed, and she had placed that purse in Sallie’s room. She wanted people to think they had taken them—it had seemed a clever thing to do—perhaps it wasn’t as clever as she had thought. But if Doctor Rhodes would just forgive her this time, she wouldn’t touch another thing, ever.
“But what about Sallie?” questioned Doctor Rhodes, hoping to find a little redeeming conscience in Laura. “And that other youngster, Marjory? How are they to be cleared?”
“I don’t care about them,” returned vulgar little Laura, hard-heartedly. “They’re just nobody. Marjory’s folks don’t amount to anything—just a queer old aunt in a small town—and everybody knows Sallie is just nothing—no folks or money or anything else. Now listen (Laura always said ‘Now listen’): My father has made money in the automobile business. He’s richer—”
“Do you mean to say,” demanded Doctor Rhodes, “that you’d actually be willing to let those honest little girls rest under a suspicion that they don’t deserve just because they happen to be poorer than you are? That you’d hide behind them—”
“I don’t care anything about them,” repeated Laura, stubbornly. “They’re nothing to me.”
“However,” returned Doctor Rhodes, “in simple justice, they will have to be cleared—and they are going to be cleared. I care, if you don’t, what happens to those children. It’s my duty to protect my pupils—”
“Well, then,” interrupted Laura, hopefully, “why not protect me? Folks’ll forget all about it after awhile and nobody’ll be hurt so very much. Aw, come on, now. Just forget it all.”
“I’m going to tell the truth,” declared Doctor Rhodes, who was finding Laura quite the most detestable child he had so far encountered. “There is no place in this school for a dishonest girl or for a girl with so little kindness for her fellow pupils. There is such a thing as school spirit—”
“Well, anyhow,” pleaded Laura, “just wait another two weeks. I’m not coming back after Easter vacation; so you might as well wait until then before you give me away, if you’re going to do it. My mother has a friend that says he’ll give me a good job in the movies; and that’s what I’d like to do. You can give those things back to their owners after I’m gone and say any old thing you like about me. It won’t hurt me any then.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have people remember you with liking and respect?” asked Doctor Rhodes, thoroughly shocked by Laura’s hardened conscience. “Have you no shame at all?”
Laura shrugged her shoulders, a trick she had perfected by watching Madame Bolande. She tilted her chin and partly closed her eyes—to show her complete indifference to what people might think of her. She was not at all pretty when she did these things.
“I can see no reason for sparing you in any way,” said Doctor Rhodes, coldly. “You may go to your room now and write for your mother to come for you at once. If she isn’t here inside of three days I shall telegraph for her. Within five minutes after your departure, I shall state on the bulletin board that Miss Gladys de Milligan has been expelled under circumstances that absolutely prove the innocence of every other pupil in this school.”
All this was done. Untruthful Laura, making her farewells airily, told her friends that she was merely going home a little ahead of time in order to have a longer vacation for spring shopping and necessary dressmaking. She’d see them all again right after Easter, and bring back lovely presents for all of them. She borrowed Augusta’s best middy scarf in order, she said, that her mother might select about a dozen like it for her to give to the other girls. Augusta, of course, never saw either cheap little Laura or the precious scarf again.
Laura was certainly not a nice child; but circumstances were against her. She possessed a decidedly foolish, unladylike and not altogether truthful mother so perhaps Laura’s lack of good qualities was not entirely her own fault. With a really nice mother, she might have been a really nice girl; but Mrs. Milligan’s daughter had very little chance.
During the last three days of Laura’s stay, it seemed to Jean that things were not clearing up as rapidly as Miss Blossom had predicted. She wondered if, after all, nothing had been done for Marjory. Poor little Marjory, in spite of Jean’s encouraging words, in spite of Mrs. Henry’s reassuring smiles and Miss Blossom’s hopeful glances, could see no way out of her troubles. Hazel still drew her skirts aside when Marjory passed and snippy little Lillian Thwaite still almost tipped over backwards in her efforts to turn her very small nose up in Marjory’s presence (for sticking-up purposes, it was really a very poor nose). And to Jean’s surprise, there was Laura, apparently perfectly unconcerned, going on just as she always had. Was nothing ever going to be done to clear Marjory and Sallie?
Notwithstanding many unusual kindnesses from her Lakeville friends—even always-hungry Mabel begged her to eat part of her favorite dessert—puzzled Marjory felt that the sky was dark above her and the world a terrible place for little girls just her size. And then, quite suddenly, Laura was whisked away by her mother, and Doctor Rhodes, chalk in hand and frowning prodigiously, was approaching the fateful bulletin board.
You can imagine how, five minutes after Laura’s going, the always curious girls flocked to the bulletin board to see what Doctor Rhodes had posted thereon. How eagerly they read the astonishing announcement and how their tongues wagged afterwards. How glad Marjory and Sallie were to have the mystery cleared away and how relieved the Lakeville girls felt at having their precious Marjory emerge from the cloud that had obscured her happiness for so long a time.
“Right after Gladys’s mother came this morning,” said Sallie, “there was something going on in the office. It sounded very much like a very angry woman telling Doctor Rhodes just what she thought of him; but of course I didn’t stay to listen—I wanted to just awfully. But when I went back afterwards with the message I was waiting to deliver, the lady was gone and poor Doctor Rhodes was mopping perspiration from his forehead, although the room was quite cold. I guessed he’d been having a right trying interview with somebody. He looked perfectly wilted.”
Mabel giggled. “I guess he had one all right if it was Mrs. Milligan. We used to hear her in Lakeville.”
But Jean watched the smoke of the train that was bearing tawdry little Gladys Evelyn de Milligan toward Chicago, and out of this tale, and was sorry.
“Poor foolish Laura,” she breathed, “I’m so sorry you had to be you. You were smart enough to have made a perfectly lovely girl and I did have hopes of you.”
“I didn’t,” said Mabel, “and I’m glad I don’t have to be polite to her any more. It’s hard enough to be polite when you really want to be. But when you’re all impolite inside—”
“We know what you mean, Mabel,” laughed Henrietta. “And now that I know the horrible secret you’ve been keeping from me all this time I am filled with admiration for all four of you. I remember now that you told me long ago about a horrid child named Laura; but I never dreamed that she and Gladys were the same person. And you, Mabel, with your ‘impolite inside’ are a complete surprise. I didn’t think you could keep a secret.”
“Jean made us,” returned Mabel.
“Well,” assured Henrietta, “I think you were right to give Gladys a chance. It was noble of you to do it even if it hasn’t turned out as well as you expected. And isn’t it great to have Sallie and Marjory cleared! And there’s Hazel apologizing this very minute for being so nasty to Marjory about those blue beads.”
“She’s lending them to Marjory,” gasped Jean. “She’s fastening them about Marjory’s neck.”