Dorothy came back to work looking very much of a wreck, but with undiminished courage for the fray. She could not recapture her position at first. Hazel was top most weeks, or was edged down by Margaret. Rhoda was finding her sprained wrist a severe nuisance. Being her right wrist, she could not write, and having to trust so largely to her memory with regard to lectures and that sort of thing, found herself handicapped at every turn.
There was one thing in Rhoda’s limitation that was a great comfort to Dorothy, and that was the inability of Rhoda to write to Tom. It had come to Dorothy’s knowledge, that although Bobby Felmore was putting down sweepstakes among the boys with a vigorous hand, gambling in some form or other was still going on, and Tom was mixed up in it.
Rhoda openly boasted in the Form-room of having helped some friends of hers to win a considerable sum of money by laying odds on Jewel, Mr. Mitre’s horse that ran at Wrothamhanger. Two days later, when Tom came over to see Dorothy, he was more jubilant than she had ever seen him, and he offered to pay back the money he had borrowed from her last term.
“How did you manage to save it?” she asked, with a sudden doubt of his inability to deny himself enough to have saved so much in such a short time.
“I did not save it, I made it,” he answered easily. “The great thing with money is not to hoard it, but to use it.”
“How could you use it, just a little money like that, to make money again?” she asked in a troubled tone.
He laughed, but refused to explain. “Oh, there are ways of doing things that girls—at least some girls—don’t understand,” he said, and refused to say anything more about it.
Dorothy handed the money back. “I think I had better not take it,” she said with brisk decision. “If you had made it honourably you would be willing to say how it had been done. If it is not clean money, I would rather not have anything to do with it, thank you.”
“Very well, go without it, then—only don’t taunt me another day with not having been willing to pay my debts,” growled Tom, pocketing the money so eagerly that it looked as if he thought she might change her mind, and want it back again.
“Tom, how did you make that money?” she asked. She was thinking of the boast Rhoda had made of having helped a friend to land a decent little sum of money.