“Perhaps they would come to you quietly?” suggested Miss Groome.
“I shall be pleased to see them if they prefer that way.” The Head was smiling and serene, but there was a hint of steel under the velvet of her manner; and then in a few quiet words she delivered her ultimatum. “Pending the making plain of this mystery of how the torn book came to be among Dorothy Sedgewick’s things, the whole Form must be somewhat under a cloud. That is like life, you know; we all have to suffer for the wrong-doing of each other. If in the past Dorothy had been proved untruthful in speech and not straight in her dealings, then we might have well let the punishment fall upon her alone. As it is, you will all do your Latin for the week without any marks. You will do your very best, too, for the girl producing poor work in this direction will immediately put herself into the position of a suspected person. If the statement of Dorothy, supported by the testimony of Hazel, is to be believed, that the book was not in the study overnight, then it must have been put there out of malice, and it is up to you to find out who has done this thing.”
The Head rose as she finished speaking, and the girls rose too, remaining on their feet until she had passed out of the room.
Great was the grumbling at the disaster which had fallen upon the Form. Individual cases of cheating at work had occurred from time to time, but nothing of this kind had cropped up within the memory of the oldest inhabitant—not in the Sixth Form, that is to say. It was supposed that by the time a girl had reached the Sixth she had sown all her wild oats, and had become both outwardly and in very truth a reliable member of society.
In this case there was malice as well as cheating. The girl who owned the key had not merely used it to get a better place in her form, but she had tried to bring an innocent person into trouble.
There was an agitated, explosive feeling in the atmosphere of the Form-room that morning. But, thanks to the hint from the Head concerning the character of work that would be expected of them, Miss Groome had no cause for complaint against any of them.
As Jessie Wayne sagely remarked, the real test concerning who was the owner of the torn book would come during the week, when the girl had to do her work without the help of her key; most likely the task for to-day had all been prepared before the book was slid in among Dorothy’s things.
There was a good half of the girls who believed that Dorothy had been using the key when she was scared by the ghost who haunted that upper floor. They did not dare put their belief into words, but they let it show in their actions, and Dorothy had to suffer.
Her great consolation was the way in which Hazel and Margaret championed her. They had certainly given her the cold shoulder that first morning, but since she had asserted her innocence so strongly, they had not swerved in their loyalty. Jessie Wayne also declared she was positive Dorothy had never used the key, because of the trouble she took over her Latin.
The talk of the upper floor being haunted reached the ears of Miss Groome, making her very angry; but she went very pale too, for, with all her learning and her qualifications, she was very primitive at the bottom, and she had confessed to being thoroughly scared when the Head had a talk with her that day after Form work was over.