SETTING THE PACE
Hazel Dring, one of the most good-natured of girls, was beginning to grumble. Margaret Prime was beginning to despair. Both of them were so much below Dorothy and Rhoda in the matter of marks that their chances of winning the Mutton Bone grew every week more shadowy.
Sometimes it was Rhoda who was top of the school, more often it was Dorothy. Professor Plimsoll talked with perfect rapture in his tone of the pleasure it was to lecture for the Compton Girls’ School, now that there were such magnificent workers there. Miss Groome was having the time of her life, and even the Head declared that the strenuous work of the Sixth must make its mark on the whole of the school.
The Head was quite unusually sympathetic in her nature. That is to say, she was more than ordinarily swift to sense something hidden. It was not according to nature, as she knew schoolgirl nature, for two girls to work at the pressure displayed by Dorothy and Rhoda. She knew Rhoda to be lazy by nature, and although ambitious, by no means the sort of girl to keep up this fierce struggle week after week. Dorothy was a worker by nature, but the almost desperate earnestness that she displayed was so much out of the common that the Head was not satisfied all was right with her.
The days were hard for Dorothy just then. She lived in a constant strain of expecting to hear from some one that the story told by Mrs. Wilson had become public property. It was just the sort of gossip a talkative person would enjoy spreading. Dorothy writhed, as in fancy she heard her father’s name bandied from mouth to mouth, and the scathing comment that would result. She even expected to hear her position as candidate for the Lamb Bursary challenged.
She was not at all clear in her own mind about it being right for her to remain a candidate. She had enrolled in ignorance of there being any impediment, she was entirely innocent of wrong in the matter, and as it was by the purest accident she had learned the true facts of the case, it seemed to her that there was no need for her to withdraw, or to make any declaration about the matter.
Still, she was not at rest. The way in which she eased her conscience on the matter savoured a good deal of drugs and soothing powders. When she felt most uneasy, then she just worked the harder, and so drowned care in work.
The term wore on. February went out in fierce cold, and March came in with tempests one day, and summer sunshine the next. Dorothy went down then with a sharp attack of flu, and for a week was shut up in the san fretting and fuming over her inability to work, and was only consoled by discovering that Rhoda had sprained her right wrist rather badly at gym work, and was unable to do anything.
Hazel mounted to the top of the school in marks that week, and the week following Margaret took her down. The two declared it was just like old times back again. But, strangely enough, they were not so elated by their victory as they might have been. Dorothy had become in a very real sense their chum, and her disaster could not fail to be something of a trouble to them.
Rhoda was unpopular because of her unpleasant trick of snubbing. Dorothy had a way of making friends; she was sympathetic and kind, which counted for a good deal, and really outweighed Rhoda’s splashes of generosity in the matter of treating special friends to chocolates, macaroons, and that sort of thing.