"Yes, let's!" said Dorothy eagerly. "Let's go now and ask Muriel to call a school meeting, and then we'll ask for Gerry to come down to it, and we'll all step out in turn and tell her how frightfully sorry we are for having been such rotters, and ask her to make it up!"
"Come on," said Phyllis. "We'll go to Muriel now." And the form trooped off to the head girl's study.
Muriel was having a private tea-party in her own room with Monica and Jack Pym. The latter had disappeared since the hockey match, although the other members of the Lower Fifth had been too excited to notice it before. Tea in their private studies was a privilege the Sixth Form girls were entitled to on Saturdays and other holidays if they liked; and to-day Muriel had asked Jack to join in the cosy little party. The head girl was not an unobservant individual, and she had noticed Jack's unhappy face and remorseful manner during that walk down from the hockey field. And after they had seen Gerry safely into Sister's care she had invited the younger girl to come and have tea with Monica and herself. The three had been having a very serious discussion respecting Gerry Wilmott and her troubles as they sat round the study fire.
"Good gracious! How many more of you are there?" exclaimed Muriel, as one by one the Lower Fifth squeezed themselves into the small room. "Is that all? Margaret Taylor, you're nearest; do you think you can manage to shut the door? Now, then, what have you all come about?"
Dorothy acted as spokeswoman.
"About Gerry Wilmott, please, Muriel," she began. "We've come to tell you what utter beasts and rotters we've been to her all the term——"
"I think I know something about that already," interrupted Muriel. "Jack's been telling me."
This abrupt announcement rather upset Dorothy's elaborate explanation. It is disconcerting when you have buoyed yourself up to confession to find that someone else has done all the confessing for you. At any other time the Lower Fifth would have been seriously annoyed with Jack for having thus forestalled the dramatic little scene it had planned with the head girl. But to-night the whole form was so genuinely upset and penitent about its treatment of Gerry Wilmott that—although they did not know quite what to say for a moment or two—they bore no grudge against the informer.
"There's something Miss Oakley wants me to tell you about Gerry," went on Muriel, surveying the discomfited faces before her. "It's not to go any further, though. Only Gerry's own form are to know about it, and Miss Oakley trusts to your honour never to mention it to Gerry herself unless she confides in you of her own free will. I didn't know it until to-day, when Miss Oakley sent for me to go to her after we'd taken Gerry to the sick-room. If I had known it, I should have behaved very differently towards her myself! It seems that she was in a bad air-raid three years ago, when she was almost a kid. The house she was in was wrecked and a nurse she was awfully fond of was killed in front of her eyes, while she herself was pinned down underneath some wreckage for hours and hours before they could get her out. She wasn't hurt, but it upset her nerves completely. And it's mostly that that has made her so shy and nervous and funky of things. Her people sent her here to see what school would do for her. Nothing was said about her awful experience, because she can't bear to talk about it, for one thing, and for another the doctors didn't want her to be treated any differently from the other girls. And they thought she would have been if people knew. But Miss Oakley says I'm to tell you now, so that you may treat Gerry with more consideration in the future."
There was a dead silence in the room. If anything had been wanting to complete the Lower Fifth's humiliation it was this! The one excuse the form had had for its conduct had been Gerry's cowardice, and it put the finishing touch to its repentance to discover that even this was not entirely her own fault. The Lower Fifth's remorse, which had been acute enough before, was almost unbearable now!