Miss Gibbs proceeded in an absolutely business-like manner. She requested a consultation, and listened while the gipsy, decidedly nervous, gave a rambling description of a dark gentleman and an Indian temple.
“Thank you,” she said at last. “I think it only fair to warn you that you can be prosecuted and fined twenty-five pounds for telling fortunes. I should like to know where you got that crystal! It’s remarkably like the ball of glass that was broken off my Venetian vase. I missed it yesterday from my mantelpiece. By the by”—stooping 89 down suddenly, and pulling aside the handkerchief from Zara’s swarthy neck—“you are wearing a locket and chain that I know to be the property of one of my pupils. It is my duty immediately to put you in the hands of the police.”
The game was up! The disconcerted gipsies rose from their alcove, and came back from the psychic to the material world. It was a hard, exacting, unsympathetic world as mirrored in Miss Gibbs’s keen grey eyes. She told them briefly to go and wash their faces and change their attire, then to report themselves in the class-room, where she would be at work correcting exercises.
“You can bring with you the money that you have collected over this business,” she added.
Half an hour later, two clean, tidy, but dejected pupils entered the class-room, and placed the sum of thirteen and ninepence upon her desk. Miss Gibbs counted it over scrupulously.
“Any girls who were foolish enough to give you this, deserve to lose it,” she remarked, “and I shall send it as a contribution to the Red Cross Fund. You will each learn two pages of Curtis’s Historical Notes by heart, and repeat them to me to-morrow after morning school. I may mention that I consider it a great liberty for any girl to enter my bedroom and remove ornaments from my mantelpiece.”
That evening, after preparation and supper, the entire school, instead of being allowed to pursue fancy work, was summoned to the lecture hall, and harangued by Miss Beasley upon the follies and dangers of superstition. She touched upon ancient beliefs in witchcraft, and modern credulity in clairvoyance 90 and spiritualism, and placed an equal ban upon both.
“In these enlightened times, with all the advantages of education to dispel ignorance,” she concluded, “it is incredible to me that anybody can still be found ready to believe in such nonsense. I beg you all, and especially those elder girls who should be leaders of the rest, to turn your thoughts and conversation to some healthier topic, and to let these morbid fancies sink into the obscurity they deserve.”
“It was a nasty hit for the monitresses!” whispered Ardiune to Raymonde afterwards. “Did you see Veronica turning as red as beetroot? We’ll have to wake early to-morrow morning, and swat at those wretched dates. It was grizzly bad luck Gibbie found us out!”
“But on the whole the game was worth the candle!” proclaimed Raymonde unrepentantly.