"Are you sure, Becky, that you have quite complete files here of this Richmond paper? For all the war time, I mean?"
"Yes. And of the South Carolina paper, too. Father collected them during and immediately following the war. He was down there for years, you see."
"I see," Ruth said quietly, and for a long time said nothing more.
But that evening she wrote several letters which she did not show Helen, and took them herself to the mailbag in the lower hall.
Before this, Mrs. Jaynes, Dr. McCurdy's sister-in-law, was settled in the room which had formerly been used by the girls as their own particular sitting-room. She was not an attractive woman at all; so it was not hard for her youthful associates on that corridor of Dare Hall to declare war upon Mrs. Jaynes.
Indeed, without having been introduced to a single girl there, Mrs. Jaynes eyed them all as though she suspected they belonged to a tribe of Bushmen.
Naturally, during hours of relaxation, and occasionally at other times, the girls joked and laughed and raced through the halls and sang and otherwise acted as a crowd of young people usually act.
Mrs. Jaynes was plainly of that sort that believes that all youthfulness and ebullition of spirits should be suppressed. Luckily, she met the girls but seldom—only when she was going to and from her room. On stormy days she remained shut up in her apartment most of the time, and Mrs. Ebbetts sent a maid up with her tray at meal time. She never ate in the Dare Hall dining-room.
Meantime, Jennie Stone had several mysterious sessions with certain of the girls who felt quite as she did regarding the usurpation of Dr. McCurdy's sister-in-law of the spare room. Had Ruth not been so busy in other directions she would have realized that a plot of some kind was in process of formation, for Helen was in it, as well.
Jennie Stone had made a friend of Clara Mayberry on the floor above. In fact, a number of the girls on the lower corridor affected by the presence of Mrs. Jaynes, were in and out of Clara's room all day long. None of these girls remained long at a time—not more than half an hour; but another visitor always appeared before the first left, right through the day, from breakfast call till "lights out." And after retiring hour there began to be seen figures stealing through the corridors and on the stairway between the two floors. That is, there would have been seen such ghostly marauders had there been anybody to watch.