CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Bonnie Dundee's heart leaped, but he forced himself to go softly. "I suppose," he said casually, "a fashionable school like this has plenty of carefully hushed-up scandals——"
"I'll say it has!" Miss Earle retorted inelegantly, and with ghoulish satisfaction. "Money can do anything! It makes my blood simply boil when I think of how those Forsyte girls in Hamilton—so smug and snobbish in their hick town 'society'—must be running poor Nita down, now that she's dead and can't defend herself!... If the truth were only known about some of them——"
Dundee could almost have embraced the homely, life-soured spinster—she was making his task so easy for him.
"I've met them all, of course, since Mrs. Selim was murdered," he said deprecatingly, "and I must say they seem to be remarkably fine women and girls——"
"Oh are they?" Miss Earle snorted. "Flora Hackett—Mrs. Tracey Miles she is now—didn't happen to tell you the nice little fuss she kicked up when she was here, did she? Oh, no! I guess not!"
"She looks," Dundee agreed, "like a girl who would have made things lively."
"I'll say so! Miss Pendleton nearly had nervous prostration!" Miss Earle plunged on, then fear blanched her face for a moment. "You know you've promised you'll never tell Miss Pendleton or Miss Macon that you talked to me!"
"You can depend on it that I will protect you," Dundee assured her. "When did Flora Hackett kick up her little fuss?"
"Let's see.... Flora graduated in June, 1920," Miss Earle obliged willingly. "So it must have been in 1919—yes, because she had one more year here. Of course they let her come back!... Money!... She took the lead in our annual Easter play in 1919, and just because Serena Hart complimented her and told her she was almost as good as a professional—"