“And your reasons?” asked Madame Schakael, quite calmly.
“She is a perfect nobody!” gasped Cora. “She came here from a charity school. She’s never lived anywhere else but at that school. She doesn’t know a living thing about herself—who she is, what her folks were, why they abandoned her——”
Possibly Madame Schakael said something. But, if so, neither of the three heard what it was. Yet Cora suddenly stopped in her tirade—stricken dumb by the expression on the principal’s countenance.
The little lady’s face was ablaze with emotion. She raised a warning hand and it seemed as though, for a moment, she could not herself speak.
“Girl! Who has dared tell you such perfectly ridiculous things? What is the meaning of this wrangle in Pinewood Hall? I am amazed—perfectly amazed—that a girl under my charge should express herself so cruelly and rudely, as well as in so nonsensical a manner.
“To put you right, first of all, Miss Rathmore, Miss Nelson’s position in life is entirely different from what you seem to suspect. She is an orphan. I understand; but Mr. Henry Gordon has a careful oversight of her welfare, and he pays for her education out of funds in his hands for that purpose, and I am instructed to let her want for nothing. She is not at all the friendless object of charity that you have evidently been led to believe.
“The Higbee Endowment School in which Miss Nelson has been educated is by no means a charitable institution. It is a much better school than the one in which you were taught previous to coming to Pinewood, Miss Rathmore; I can accept pupils from Higbee into my freshman classes without any special preparation.
“I had no idea that girls under my charge would be so cruel as you seem to be toward Nancy Nelson. Corinne! what does it mean?”
“I’m afraid I have let it go too far, Madame,” responded the senior, gravely. “But you know, these freshmen have got to learn to fight their own battles. I had to when I came.”
“Yes, yes; that is all right,” said the principal, waving her hand. “But remember, Corinne, I mentioned to you when Nancy Nelson came that she was one of the sensitive kind.”