"I feel—all dizzy!" she gasped.
An officious junior, quite unnecessarily, ran for Miss Lodge, magnifying the accident so much in her highly coloured account that the mistress arrived on the scene prepared to find Rona stretched unconscious. Seeing that the girl looked white and tearful, she ordered her promptly to bed.
"It may be nothing, but any rate you will be better lying down," she decreed. "Go downstairs, girls, all of you. Nobody is to come into the studio again to-night."
"Rona had my pendant in her hand all the time," grumbled Stephanie to Beth as she obeyed the mistress's orders. "She dropped it as she fell. I've put it back safely, though, and I don't mean to let anybody interfere with it. I shall complain to Miss Bowes if it's touched again."
[CHAPTER XVII]
A Storm-cloud
Rona woke up next morning without even a headache, in Miss Lodge's opinion "justifying the prompt measures taken", but according to the girls, "showing there had been nothing the matter with her to make such a fuss about". Breakfast proceeded as usual, and afterwards came the short interval before nine-o'clock school. Now on this day the contributions to the Art exhibition were to be packed up and dispatched by a special carrier, and Stephanie, as a budding metalworker, ran upstairs to the studio to take one last peep at her exhibit. She flew down again with white face and burning eyes.
"Girls!" she cried shakily. "Girls! Somebody's taken my pendant! It's gone!"