time the whole dormitory seemed to be awake.
“I heard what she said!” Vera cried. “Off again, is she? Well this time it will finish her! I’ll get her kicked out of the school for this! Throw me about the solarium, will she!”
“Shut up!” hissed Molly Webster, one of her study mates. “You’ll be having Tanny here in a minute!”
“Let her come!” Vera snapped. “If she doesn’t, I’m going to her.”
Vera got decisively out of bed, put on slippers and a dressing gown. She headed towards the door, but before she reached it Joan and Beryl Mather had caught her arms tightly.
“Wait a minute, Vera!” Joan insisted. “If you keep on running to Tanny with stories, you’re liable to get yourself labelled as a sneak, and you know what that will mean. You just won’t be head girl any longer!”
Vera hesitated, looking across at Molly.
“We can settle this between ourselves,” Molly said. “Anyway, Frances didn’t get expelled last time, so she probably won’t this. I think she’s one of Black’s favourites—”
“That isn’t true!” Joan said hotly. “And since it seems to get on all your nerves, why don’t you have it out with her personally when she comes back? That’s only right!”
“Listen to little Joan standing up for wayward little Frances,” Vera sneered. “It makes me sick! You and Tiny there and Frances are as thick as thieves. Why don’t you share your joys and sorrows with us? And another thing, Joan, when are you going to share that parcel you got this morning?”
“I can’t share it,” Joan retorted. “It was a pair of stockings and I’m sticking to it!”
“One day,” Vera mused, her eyes narrowing, “I’m going to take you apart, Joan! But first I’ll deal with Frances! Just wait until she gets back!”
She put the light out again, drew the curtains away from the windows once more, then back to bed to wait. The example set the other girls did likewise.
It was nearly an hour later before Frances reappeared at the big window and opened it silently. Just as carefully she closed it and began to glide across to her bed; then there was stealthy movement in the dark, and she found herself surrounded with torch-beams playing on her face.
“Well, Miss Gadabout, what this time?” Vera demanded. “Been out with your precious science master again? He’s still in the village, you know, even if he has quit the school. I saw him this afternoon when I went shopping.”
“Is it any business of yours where I’ve been?” Frances asked, in that quiet, insolent voice she had.
“As head girl of this class, it definitely is! I’d have reported it to Miss Tanby right away but for—my sense of honour.… And don’t smile like that, either! You can’t keep on breaking rules when it is my job to see that they’re kept!”
“I’m afraid you take an awful lot on your shoulders,” Frances said coolly, taking off her overcoat and returning it to her locker. “And don’t keep flashing that beam in my face, please. Or are you playing at gangsters?”
“That’s it!” Vera whispered. “Give me one chance and I’ll break your neck one day, Frances—believe me!”
Frances sat on the side of her bed and began to undress leisurely. The torches had been extinguished now, but she could see the girls hovering over her in the moonlight.
“You’re all very tiresome,” she sighed. “If I feel like going out for a walk in the moonlight, I’ll go! Anyway, Vera, a girl with a cloddish mind like yours can’t be expected to feel as I do. My father is a traveller and a soldier, remember. I get the wanderlust from him.”
“You’re not going to call me a clod and get away with it!” Vera snapped.
“Oh, why don’t you leave her alone?” growled Cynthia Vane, her other study mate. “I don’t like her either, but why do we have to lose our sleep just because of that? If she wants to creep about, let her!”
“Anyway,” Molly Webster said, “one would think you’d never broken a rule in your life, Vera! I’ve been here long enough to know that you’ve broken every rule in the book in order to be top girl. Let’s get back to bed—”
Vera hesitated, then with memories of her fall in the solarium at the back of her mind, she relaxed and nodded slowly.
“All right, we’ll go back to sleep. Otherwise there will be some questions asked if we’re tired in class tomorrow. But I’m not finished with you yet, Frances Hasleigh! I know what you want—to be in my place. And that issue’s got to be decided! Before I’m finished with you, you’ll be on your knees begging for mercy!”
Frances did not answer. Undressed by now, she climbed into bed, drew the covers over her and remained silent. Grim-faced, Vera plodded back to bed. The group broke up and retired again.
After her one infraction Frances did not break the rules again during the rest of her week’s punishment—but whether it was because she was uncertain of what Vera Randal might do was not entirely clear. She said so little, even to her two study mates, and by now they had become her bosom friends. They both gave every impression of liking her really, despite her rather queer temperament.
The only thrill the girls got as the week ended and Frances found herself free again—on probation anyway—was the arrival of a new science master, by the name of Clive Whittaker. All hopes of a young man rather less dull than Robert Lever were realised when into the classroom to take biology there walked one afternoon a man of perhaps twenty-eight, tall and stooping, clean-shaven, with black wavy hair and a rather pale face. Somehow he looked delicate, or else it was an impression conveyed by his bent shoulders.
But he knew his job, as the girls soon found out—and to their delight he treated them, in every Form, with an easy courtesy calculated to get the best out of their studies. There was none of the dull recital of facts that had made Robert Lever so outstandingly uninteresting.
For some reason, Frances came to life in real earnest when he took the class. Her usual languid contempt entirely disappeared, and instead she had brightly sparkling grey eyes and a merry smile. It was most extraordinary, and more than one girl noticed it, too. Then, when she was only listening to Whittaker instead of answering his scientific posers, Frances sat looking at him with a kind of awed reverence that made more than one girl nudge another and then stifle a giggle.
It was finally Joan Dawson who brought the matter to a head when the class was over on the Monday afternoon. She, Frances, and Tiny Mather were strolling out of the School House into the warmth of the sunlit quadrangle.
“I suppose,” Joan said, “that it’s your weakness for brainy young men that makes you go cow-eyed when you see Whittaker?”
“I think he’s just marvellous,” Frances said simply. Joan and Beryl glanced at each other.
“But he’s got round shoulders!” Beryl protested.
“Ah, but his mind!” Frances said dreamily.
“Well—er—would you like to tell him so?” Joan asked drily. “Here he is now—approaching. Looks as though he’s
