“I am afraid so,” answered Dorothy, and again she quailed at the look in his eyes. “Didn’t you hear all the booing when we won the cup?”
“Of course. I booed myself with might and main; but that was only because we had lost it,” said Tom.
Dorothy shook her head. “I am afraid it is more than that—there was such a lot of malice in the noise. Hazel told me that some one threw a bag of flour at Rhoda, and written across the bag were the words ‘For a sneak’; so it looks as if they knew.”
“If that is the case, you bet I am in for it right up to my back teeth,” growled Tom; and turning he walked away with never another word to Dorothy, who reflected sorrowfully that he was much more concerned at the prospect of losing the goodwill of his fellows than because he was implicated in such a serious breach of rules and regulations.
Dorothy did not see him again that day. She did not see him on the next day either; but rumours were rife in the girls’ school that the boys involved in the night-club business were in for a row of magnitude.
The work of the week was so exacting and absorbing that Dorothy found herself with but little time for thinking of Tom and his troubles.
On Sunday—the last Sunday of term it was—Tom appeared with the other boys in the gardens of the girls’ school; but he looked so miserable that Dorothy had a sudden, sharp anxiety about him.
“Oh, Tom, what is it?” she cried.
“Don’t you know?” he said, looking at her with tragic eyes. “The Head has sent for the governor, and I don’t feel as if I could face him when he comes.”
“For the governor?” echoed Dorothy blankly, and in the eyes of her mind she was seeing those grave frock-coated gentlemen who had sat on the dais in the lecture hall that day last autumn, at the enrolment of the candidates for the Lamb Bursary. She wondered why Dr. Cameron had thought it necessary to send for one of the school governors about a case of school discipline.