Bread and water! The thought of the child being so hungry that she had eaten discarded, dry bread, washed down with water from the fountain in the campus, brought tears to Ruth’s eyes.
“Oh! I wish I knew what was best to do for her,” thought Ruth. “Should I tell Mrs. Tellingham? Or, mightn’t I get some of the girls interested in her? Dear Helen has plenty of money, and she is just as tender-hearted as she can be.”
Yet Ruth had given her promise to take nobody into her confidence about the half-wild girl; and, with Ruth Fielding, “a promise was a promise!”
In the morning, there was soon a buzz of excitement all over the school regarding the strange happening at the fountain on the campus. One girl whispered it to another, and the tale spread like wildfire. However, the teachers and the principal did not hear of the affair.
Ruth’s lips, she decided, were sealed for the present regarding the mysterious girl who had pushed Sarah Fish into what Heavy declared was “her proper element.” The wildest and most improbable stories and suspicions were circulated before assembly hour, regarding the Unknown.
There was so much said, and so many questions asked, in the quartette room where Ruth was located, that she felt like running away herself. But at mail time Madge Steele burst into the dormitory “charged to the muzzle,” as The Fox expressed it, with a new topic of conversation.
“What do you think, girls? Oh! what do you think?” she cried. “We’re going to live at Sunrise Farm.”
“Ha! you ask us a question and answer it in the same breath,” said Mercy, with a snap. “Now you’ve spilled the beans and we don’t care anything about it at all.”
“You do care,” declared Madge. “I ask you first of all, Mercy. I invite every one of you for the last week in June and the first two weeks of July at Sunrise Farm——”
“Oh, wait!” exclaimed Mary Cox, otherwise “The Fox.” “Do begin at the beginning. I, for one, never heard of Sunrise Farm before.”