"Goodbye! I can't wait! Oh, Gipsy! when shall I see you again?"
"Some day. I promise that! The bell's stopping! You'll be late, Meg, if you don't scoot."
Torn in two between her reluctance to part from her friend and her anxiety to be in time for call-over, Meg hurried away without further farewell; and Gipsy, in wildest fear of detection, metaphorically speaking burnt her boats, and darting through the side gate, ran with all possible speed down the high-road.
CHAPTER XVII
A Tangled Story
Meg rushed to the lecture hall just in time to enter unobtrusively among a crowd of other girls, and to take her seat for afternoon call-over without attracting special notice from mistresses or monitresses. She congratulated herself on having been promoted to Mr. Cobb's painting class. The fact of her change of costume would be quite lost upon him, though Miss Harris, the ordinary drawing mistress, might possibly have recognized Gipsy's dress. One or two of her Form mates stared at her curiously, but the greater number were too much preoccupied with answering "present" to their names, and filing away to their various classes, to pay any particular attention to her. The girls at the painting lesson, with the exception of Fiona Campbell, were all Seniors. If they realized any difference in Meg's appearance, there was no opportunity either for them to make comments or for her to give explanations. I am afraid the study in oil colours of carnations, upon which she was engaged, did not make much progress that afternoon, for her thoughts were entirely about Gipsy, wondering how far she had got upon her travels, and whether Miss Poppleton had yet discovered her absence.
Directly the four o'clock bell rang and the class was released, Meg, leaving the other girls leisurely putting away their tubes of paints and cleaning their palettes, scrambled her possessions together anyhow, and bolted from the room before she could be questioned. Going boldly to the boarders' cupboard in the hall, she purloined Gipsy's hat, and, without waiting even to tell her story to Hetty and Dilys, departed from the premises with all possible speed.
She had come to school that day on her bicycle, and fetching it hastily from the shed where all the machines were stored, she rode away in the direction of Greyfield. There was something slightly wrong with one of her pedals, and her father had told her that morning that she had better have it mended at once, so she intended to take the cycle to the depot where it had been bought, and let it be thoroughly overhauled before she returned home. The assistant at the shop promised to have the repairs finished in about half an hour, and Meg therefore strolled into the town, to wait with what patience she could muster. She walked up Corporation Street and round by the Town Hall, peeped into the Parish Church and the Free Library, then finding herself close to the railway station, decided to go and buy a copy of Home Chat or Tit Bits at the bookstall.