“‘Silence was her answer; Low she bowed her head!’” chanted Corinne, in a sing-song tone. “It sounded like a washerwomen’s convention, and now it has suddenly changed to a Quaker meeting. Come! what’s the trouble?” and she spoke more sharply as she began to descend the stairs.
“None of your business, Miss!” snapped the black-eyed girl, made even angrier at this interruption.
“Wrong Cora—wrong. It is my business. Somebody will call me to account for it if you West Side infants raise ructions in the main hall. You know that. So, out with the difficulty.”
Cora still remained scornfully silent.
“It is about Nancy, here, again, I suppose,” said Corinne, finally reaching Nancy’s side, and resting one hand lightly on the latter’s shoulders. “You girls seem unable to annoy anybody else but Nancy Nelson. And if I were she”—she was coolly looking around the group and soon identified them as the party that had been punished with Nancy over Number 30’s spread,—“I never would stand it.
“She is too easy.... That is what is the matter with her. When Madame Schakael found her in Jennie’s room that night she ought to have told just how she had been crowded out of her own room—and after paying for all the goodies you girls stuffed yourselves with, too!
“Why, I’d be ashamed! She took her punishment and never said a word. Jennie can prove that. And all you little fools have laid your punishment to her. And after eating her spread——”
“That isn’t so!” snapped Cora, in a rage.
“What isn’t so?”
“She knows she’s going to be paid back for what she spent on the supper,” declared Cora.