She smiled up at him bravely, for presentiments of her meeting with the Forest were already beginning to creep into her heart.
“Good-by,” he said, and in a moment more he was swinging down the walk and Peggy softly opened the door and scurried upstairs to her room. As always happens at a time like that, the gay roar of voices in the dining-room died down as she came in, and to everyone and certainly to Mrs. Forest the slight sound of her moccasined feet on the stairs was plainly audible.
When she came down a few minutes later, glowing in a pink evening dress, Mrs. Forest’s stare was like a cluster of icicles.
“No supper for Miss Parsons,” she sent word by the maid, and after Peggy, mighty glad that she had just had plenty of hot soup and chocolate, had gone back to her room amid the sympathetic glances of the dining-room full of girls, the principal called that dread and clammily unpleasant thing known to boarding schools as a “house-meeting.”
She herself presided, and the meeting was seldom called for any good, you may believe. Its object was rather the punishment of someone with all the sickening stages of a public investigation into her conduct first. Mrs. Forest had a way of making the girls cry in a homesick fashion at these affairs and perhaps it is hardly doing her an injustice to say that she enjoyed it. At least the girls were all perfectly convinced that it was her sport in life, and they resented particularly that their idol, Peggy, should be the subject of this one.
A deputation of girls went clattering up after the victim and brought her down, showing no further marks of perturbation than a tiny little line of uncertainty in her forehead.
“Sit here, Miss Parsons,” commanded Mrs. Forest as soon as all the girls had gathered.
Peggy sank gracefully into a chair and thrust out her pink satin slippers daintily. Mrs. Forest could not know how those tired little feet ached inside those bright slippers.
“Young ladies, I have called this meeting in order that I may have it understood that in my school the rules are to be obeyed. Now I want to ask each one of you what you think the rules are for? Do you think they were made with the idea of having them obeyed? Miss Thomas, will you answer first?”
Florence felt like the most complete traitor to Peggy that she should even be questioned on such a subject when she knew the whole proceeding was aimed at her friend.