“Humph! Well, you’re a funny kid,” said the senior, leaving her. “You’ll never get along in this girls’ menagerie if you let ’em walk all over you.”
Nancy had been afraid that Corinne would go to the lower floor with her. But when the bigger girl left her, she slipped down the stairs like a streak and ran for the rear door of the West Side.
She saw nobody. The lower corridors seemed empty. She reached the unlocked door and had her hand upon the knob. Indeed, she turned the knob and pulled the door toward her.
The cold evening air blew in upon her face. It was the Breath of the Wide World—that world that lay before her if she left the shelter of Pinewood Hall and the bitterness of her life here.
And then, for the first time, a thought struck her. She had been forbidden to leave the building, save at stated times with the physical instructor, until the Christmas holidays, which were three weeks away.
Madame Schakael had bound her, on her honor, to remain a prisoner in the Hall until the ban of displeasure should be lifted. She had tacitly promised to obey, and therefore the Madame had set no spy upon Nancy’s footsteps. There was no watching of the girls suffering under punishment. That was not the system of Pinewood Hall and its mistress.
How could Nancy break her word to Madame Schakael? Never had the Madame spoken otherwise than kindly to her. Even when she meted out punishment to her, Nancy knew that the punishment was just. The Madame could have done no less.
The principal had not even urged Nancy to report her schoolmates on the night of the party at Number 30, West Side. She had accepted her statement, as far as it went, as perfectly honest, too. She had not punished Jennie Bruce.
“Why, I can’t run away and make Madame Schakael trouble!” gasped Nancy, closing the door again softly and crouching there in the dark hallway. “Mr. Gordon might make her trouble. Besides—I’ve promised.”
The girl was much shaken by her fear of what cruelty Cora Rathmore and Grace Montgomery would mete out to her. Yet she could not play what seemed to her mind a “mean trick” upon the doll-like principal who had been so kind to her.