“We’ll only run across Cora in Number 30—and I don’t want to have to slap her face!” declared the still wrathful Jennie.
“Then I’ll help you pack up your things to bring to Number 30,” said Nancy.
“Oh, not before supper, Nance!” cried Jennie, in horror. “I could go out and bite a piece off the stone step, and swallow it right down, I’m so hungry.”
For the first time since she had come to Pinewood Hall, Nancy Nelson went down to supper with her arm around another girl’s waist, and another girl’s arm around hers.
Jennie Bruce boldly sat beside her, too, although she belonged at another table. And they whispered together, and giggled, and were even reproved by one of the teachers—which was likewise a new experience for Nancy, and perhaps did her no particular harm.
“Ah-ha, Miss Mousie!” said Corinne, pausing by the new chums as she made her tour of inspection, and pinching Nancy’s ear; “I see now I shall have both you and Bruce to watch. But don’t you two go too far.”
Really, a brand new existence had opened for Nancy. Jennie’s ready championship of her did much to influence the opinion of the other girls; and the story Grace Montgomery and Cora Rathmore spread regarding Nancy fell rather flat.
The Montgomery clique, after all, embraced only a very few of the freshman class and some half dozen or more sophs. The latter had no influence at all in Nancy’s class for, naturally, it was “war to the knife” between the freshies and the class immediately above them in the school.
Corinne, too, after the grand explosion in which the Madame herself had taken part, saw to it more particularly that the Montgomery crowd did not “pick on” Nancy. If Jennie was about, however, that was sufficient. Jennie Bruce would fight for her friend at the least provocation.
Yet, after all, Nancy was not entirely easy in her mind. That the story of her being a “mere nobody” had failed to make her ostracised by the better class of Pinewood Hall girls, was a delightful fact.