But there was such a buzz of comment that Miss Cramp looked up again. Julia Semple had seemed half stunned for the moment. Then she wheeled on Ruth and said, in a sharp whisper:
"I saw that Cameron girl spell it for you! She's been helping you all the time! Everybody knows she's patronizing and helping you. Why, you're wearing her old, cast-off clothes. You've got one of her dresses on now! Pauper!"
Ruth started back, her face turned red, then white, as though she had been struck. The smarting tears started to her eyes, and blinded her.
"Julia! take your seat instantly!" said Miss Cramp, more sharply. "Ruth! spell 'acalycine.'"
But Ruth could not open her lips. Had she done so she would have burst into tears. And she could not have spelled the word right—nor any other word right—at that moment. She merely shook her head and followed Julia to her seat, stumblingly, while a dead silence fell upon the room.
CHAPTER XX
UNCLE JABEZ IS MYSTERIOUS
Miss Cramp was in the habit of calling upon some trustee to speak at the close of the exercises—usually Mr. Semple—and then there was a little social time before the assemblage broke up. But the frown on the chairman's face did not suggest that that gentleman had anything very jovial to say at the moment, and the teacher closed the exercises herself in a few words that were not at all personal to the winner of the spelling-match.
When the stir of people moving about aroused Ruth, her only thought was to get away from the schoolhouse. Perhaps not more than two dozen people had distinctly heard what Julia so cruelly said to her; but it seemed to the girl from the Red Mill as though everybody in that throng knew that she was a charity child—that, as Julia said, the very frock she had on belonged to somebody else.
And to Helen! She had never for a moment suspected that Helen had been the donor of the three frocks. Of course everybody in the neighborhood had known all the time that she was wearing Helen's cast-off clothing. Everybody but Ruth herself would have recognized the dresses; she had been in the neighborhood so short a time that, of course, she was not very well acquainted with Helen's wardrobe.