"To whom does this belong?" she enquired sharply.
"It's mine, Miss Rowe, please," said Cissie.
"Did you draw it?"
"No, Miss Rowe."
"Then who did?"
"Patty Hirst," said Cissie, who had not seen Vera's alteration, and thought the portrait so flattering and talented that she saw no reason for withholding the artist's name, and, indeed, considered Patty might well be proud of such an achievement.
"Then I think Patty Hirst might employ her time more profitably," said Miss Rowe, and, turning very pink, she tore the picture across, and threw it into the waste-paper basket.
Cissie rescued the fragments afterwards, and pieced them together, and when she discovered the addition which had been made, her wrath and indignation knew no bounds. As for Patty, she was nearly heart-broken at the affair. She genuinely liked Miss Rowe, and could not bear her to think that she would have been so cruel and indelicate as to call attention to her one blemish. Even Vera was penitent, for though she had had the bad taste to alter the drawing, she certainly had not intended it to fall into the hands of the mistress herself. The hard part of it was that no one liked to explain, because to refer to it at all would only have seemed to make matters worse; so the girls consoled Patty as best they could, but it was a long time before she could get over it. Perhaps on the whole the occurrence made Vera a little less nasty to Patty. She was a proud, but not altogether an ungenerous girl, and she was genuinely sorry to have thus thrown blame on undeserving shoulders. But for Muriel's influence she would have been almost ready to follow the example of Kitty and Maud, and if not to make friends, at least to treat with tolerance a companion who was so particularly inoffensive, and so willing to meet an apology halfway.
The war which Patty waged in her bedroom still went on as before. Every night one of her companions would relight the gas, in spite of all entreaties. Sometimes Patty would get up and turn it out, greatly to the wrath of the others, who would retaliate next day by hiding her brush and comb, or dropping her cake of soap into her water jug. It was a most unpleasant state of affairs, and seemed likely to continue indefinitely, when an incident fortunately happened which led to a truce.
One November afternoon, when the girls were returning from hockey, Patty, in strolling through the shrubbery, noticed that the gardener, who had probably been unstopping one of the gutters, had left his ladder leaning against a wall, thus giving access to the flat roof of the lecture hall. Patty at home had sometimes been called a tomboy, and she could not resist climbing up to see what the world looked like from the top. She had reached the leads, and was on the point of stepping over a large spout, when she heard the sound of laughter on the roof, and stopped to listen. Someone was evidently already there, and, recognizing the voices of Doris, May, and Ella, she decided not to follow them. An idea had suddenly occurred to her, and acting upon it at once she descended to the ground, then, very gently removing the ladder, she laid it at the foot of the wall. The gardener's wheelbarrow, full of dead leaves, stood conveniently near, under the shelter of a large rhododendron, so she sat down on it, and waited for what she knew was bound to happen. I believe there was a little mischief in her eyes, for Patty liked a joke as well as anybody, and she thought the occasion offered considerable opportunities for fun. She had not to wait long. In a few minutes her three room mates, who had explored the roof as far as they dared to venture, returned to the spot where they had left the ladder, and were much astonished to find it gone.