Joan looked up at the sky, she looked down at her white tennis shoes, and then her gaze went wandering as if she were in search of inspiration. Finally she burst out, “I hate to have to tell you, but Daisy and I tossed up as to which should do it, and I am the unlucky one: your brother has mixed himself up in a particularly beastly sort of scrape.”
“Tom is in a scrape?” breathed Dorothy, and suddenly she felt as if it were her fault, for she had seen so little of Tom this term, and when she had seen him he had not cared to be in any way confidential.
Joan nodded in an emphatic fashion. “A silly noodle he must be to be cat’s-paw for a girl in such a silly way.”
“What has he done?” asked Dorothy, striving to keep calm and quiet, yet feeling a wild desire to seize and shake the information out of her.
“I don’t know the real rights of it,” said Joan. “I know a little, and guess a lot more. Rhoda has dropped quite a considerable lot of money lately in hospital raffles and in the sweepstakes that were got up to provide that new wing for the infirmary. As she has helped Tom to so many plums in the way of winning money in the past, it was only natural that she turned to him when she got into a muddle herself. She was in a rather extra special muddle, too, for she was holding the money we raised for the archery club, and when the time came to pay it over, lo! it was not, for she had spent it, and her dump from home had not arrived. To tide her over the bad bit she applied to Tom. He said he had no money, and did not know where to get it. She, in desperation—and Rhoda knows how to scratch when she is in a corner—wrote to Tom that if the money was not forthcoming in twenty-four hours, she would tell his Head of the doings at the night-club.”
“What night-club?” demanded Dorothy, aghast.
“Oh, I don’t know. Boys are in mischief all the time, I think,” said Joan impatiently; and then she went on, “The time-limit passed; Rhoda got still more desperate and still more catty. Finding Tom did not pay up—did not even send to plead for longer time, or take any other notice of her ultimatum—Rhoda wrote her letter to Tom’s Head, and actually posted it. This letter had not been in the post half an hour when her money from home arrived. She was able to get out of her fix, but she was not able to stop having got Tom into an awful sort of row. And now she is so mad with herself, that the Compton School is not big enough to hold her in any sort of comfort.”
“This night-club, what is it exactly?” Dorothy turned her back on the tennis players, and faced Joan with devouring anxiety in her eyes.
“I don’t know really; I think it is got up by some of the young officers at the camp. Lots of them are Compton old boys, you know. I think they meet somewhere at dead of night to drink and play cards, and go on the burst generally. They call it going the pace. I suppose they let some of our boys in for old sake’s sake, though it would be kinder to the boys if they did not. Anyhow, it is all out now. The boys will get in a row, the young officers may get court-martialled, or whatever they do with them up there, and all because a girl lost her temper through not being able to twist Tom round her little finger.”
“Joan, I am ever so grateful to you for telling me all this, even though I can’t see any way of helping Tom,” said Dorothy; and then she asked, “Does he know that Rhoda has told Dr. Cameron?”