Doreen had taken the defection of the Juniors much to heart, and could not forgive the leader of the opposition.
"Thanks! I wasn't aware my movements were so original!" retorted Gipsy. "There's method in my madness this time, though. I was trying to dodge Miss White, and dash upstairs to get my Hamlet. I've forgotten the wretched thing, and if I go to class without a book, Poppie—h'm! I mean Miss Poppleton" (as Doreen's eyebrows went up)—"will want to know the reason why."
"I expect she will," returned Doreen dryly. "And serve you right too, for forgetting! No, I shall not allow you to go and fetch it. I'm here to keep order, not to help you out of scrapes."
The Upper Fourth, under Doreen's superintendence, had just filed from its own classroom to attend a Shakespeare lecture by the Principal. The girls were a few minutes early, and in consequence were drawn up like a small regiment in the corridor to wait until a previous class was over and they could enter the lecture hall. Waiting is often dull work, and Gipsy had considered herself a public benefactor in seeking to enliven the tedium of her form mates. Doreen's notions on the subject of discipline did not appeal to her.
"But I can't go to the Shakespeare lesson without my Hamlet," she remonstrated. "Suppose I'm asked to read?"
"You should have thought of that before!" snapped Doreen. "Be quiet, Gipsy Latimer; if you speak another word I shall report you!"
Gipsy refrained from further unavailing speech, but her active brain was by no means silenced. I do not think anybody but herself would have dreamed of doing what followed. The outer door of the corridor was standing open, and when the monitress's back was for the moment turned, Gipsy slipped out into the playground. On the opposite side of the quadrangle stood the open window of her classroom, ten feet or so above the ground. The wall of that part of the house was thickly covered with ivy, and in less time than it takes to tell it she was scrambling up with as much agility as the monkey to which Doreen had unfeelingly compared her. A few girls who happened to be standing near the door and witnessed her achievement gasped audibly, but I verily believe Gipsy would have been back before she was missed, had not Maude Helm officiously chirped out:
"Oh, I say! Look at Yankee Doodle!"
Naturally the monitress did look, and fled into the courtyard in pursuit of the runaway. Her outraged face, upturned from below, greeted Gipsy as that irrepressible damsel reappeared at the window waving her Hamlet in triumph.
"Gipsy Latimer, go back down the stairs!" commanded Doreen.