Duane nodded. "Yes."
"But surely—" stammered Kitty, "she could not think of such a thing herself. Why, what does a child like her know of chemistry experiments?"
"That is one of the little points I want Duane to make clear," put in Miss St. Leger. "Yes, Kitty can stay and hear, since I believe she also narrowly escaped serious trouble over the affair."
"Through my incorrigible laziness," added Duane, with a drawl in her voice. "How I blessed Miss Vacher at that moment for disturbing me!"
"Begin at the beginning," advised Miss St. Leger.
So the head prefect told her story, quite simply and with some embarrassment, her two listeners hanging intently upon every word.
It seemed that Erica, in her blind, childish adoration of the redoubtable Peggy O'Nell, regarded that rebel's natural enemy, the head prefect, in the light of a hateful tyrant. Her highly-coloured imagination, in fact, exaggerated and magnified the attempts of the prefect to put down the junior leader, and after the ordering-off of Peggy from the sports field, her seething indignation crystallized into a fierce determination to avenge the insult offered to that much-wronged damsel.
How this was to be accomplished she had no idea; probably her feelings would have calmed down before long without any harm whatever being done, but a few chance words from Bertha—words not said in a very kindly spirit—put the whole idea into her head, an idea which would otherwise have never entered it.
The Richoter candidates had been giving an account of their morning's experiences in the laboratory, when they left it for the dinner hour. Bertha, with Erica, had been among the listeners. Strolling off afterwards, the older girl, speaking her thoughts aloud, had said with a laugh:
"Now, a very simple way of upsetting any of their apple-carts would be to meddle with the balances just now. A little weight stuck underneath the pan with a piece of putty would do the trick. Simple but effective, eh?"