'Just let me look at your answers. Why, they are exactly like mine! I know they are right. How is it all the other girls got the same as Bertha?'
'Oh, I can tell you that,' said Nora, 'They all copied her sums, for I saw them doing it just before school began. You know it was the Military Bazaar at the Assembly Rooms on Saturday, and I suppose most of the girls were there, and had no time to do their home-work, so they just scribbled down Bertha's figures before the bell rang.'
'How unfair! How shamefully mean!' cried Peggy, with flaming cheeks. 'Miss Crossland ought to work out those sums.'
'She won't, though. You made her so angry about it this morning, and when once she says a thing she sticks to it.'
'She's always hard on me somehow,' sighed Peggy. 'She's been perfectly horrible to-day. Why, Nora, what's the matter?'
For Nora had also had a tidy fit, and had been turning out her desk, and she now drew forth a book with such a very blank and rueful face that Peggy might well exclaim.
'It's the Literature Notes,' said Nora in an awe-struck voice—'that book Miss Martin lent us to copy from, and that vanished so mysteriously a month ago. Don't you remember what a fearful fuss she made about it, and we were all told to search in our desks? I thought I had looked quite to the bottom of mine, but there it was, under a pile of old exercise-books. Whatever shall I do? She will be so dreadfully angry with me.'
'Why, of course, you'll have to take it back,' said Peggy. 'But,' her love of mischief getting the upper hand, 'I don't see why we shouldn't have a little fun with it first. You won't find Miss Martin in the library now, and it would do quite as well at four o'clock, so suppose you put it inside Mary Hill's desk, just to give her a fright. She's such a goose, she'll give a perfect howl of horror when she finds it, and then we'll pretend to think she must have had it there all the time, and get her into such a state of mind before we tell her.'
Nora laughed, for practical jokes were at a high tide of popularity in the class, and many were the tricks which the girls played on one another.
'I owe Mary something,' she said, 'for she tied my hair-ribbon to the back of the desk on Friday, and when I tried to get up I was held fast by my pigtail.'