“Oh, Tom! I am so sorry for the trouble,” she burst out with ready sympathy. Tom usually wore such a happy face, that it was just dreadful to see him looking so glum.
“It is pretty rotten,” he growled. “We are to be hauled up before the Head in the morning, and goodness knows what will happen then. There is one comfort—I am not the only one in the soup; there are about twenty-five of us involved. The thing that passes my comprehension is how it all came out.”
“Don’t you know?” gasped Dorothy, so amazed at his words that she had no time to think of being discreet.
“How should I know?” he said blankly. “Why, you might have knocked me down with a feather when Clarges Major told me we’d been spotted, and that the game was up so far as our night-club was concerned. It has been such a jolly lark, too! We used to go about three nights a week, and get back about three o’clock in the morning. Some club it was, too, I can tell you! Say, Dorothy, how did you know anything about it?”
“Joan Fletcher told me. She told me how Rhoda had written all about the club to your Head, because you would not lend her the money when she was in a hole about the archery club subscriptions.” Dorothy spoke in a quiet tone; she was determined that Tom should know the true facts of the case. But she quailed a little when he turned upon her with fury in his face.
“Rhoda told because I would not lend her the money! What on earth are you driving at? That time when she talked to me about being so short, I told her then that I was in the same boat—absolutely stoney.”
“It was because you did not answer her letter, when she gave you twenty-four hours to find some money to help her out of her fix.” Dorothy stopped suddenly because of the surprise in Tom’s face. “Didn’t you have that letter?” she asked.
“I have never set eyes on it,” he answered. “When did she send it, and how?”
“I don’t know,” answered Dorothy. “Joan told me that Rhoda was so angry and so very desperate because you did not answer her letter, that, to pay you out for leaving her in the lurch, she wrote a letter to Dr. Cameron, telling him about the night-club. A little after her letter went she got the money she wanted from home, and she would have recalled her letter to your Head then if she had been able to do it, but, of course, it was too late.”
“The insufferable little cad, to blow on us like that out of sheer cattish spite!” growled Tom. Then he asked, with sharp anxiety in his tone, “Has it leaked out yet among our crowd that Rhoda told?”