"I don't wonder," declared Phyllis admiringly. "I didn't either. I thought you were just making notes. But when did you learn to do it, Jack? Of course I know you always were good at drawing, but I hadn't the slightest idea that you could do such ripping caricatures."
"I didn't know it myself," replied Jack, still busily working with her pencil. "But when we were at the seaside this year we came across a man who did them for the papers. At least I came across him. He saved my shoes and stockings from being washed away by the tide while I was paddling one morning. And then we all chummed up with him and he showed us some of his sketches, and we all started trying to do the people we saw on the beach, and he said mine were quite decent for a kid. There you are, Dorothy, there's your beloved Miss Latham. Who is it you want, Hilda? Pretty Polly? All right, I'll do her if I get the chance."
"Do one for me, Jack, there's a darling," cried a girl sitting close to Geraldine, and then the whole form began clamouring for drawings of their most beloved, or most hated, mistresses. Hilda felt it incumbent upon her to raise her voice again in protest at last.
"I say, do be quiet! Miss Parrot will be along directly. There'll be an awful bust-up if she catches us talking like this."
But her remonstrance did not have much effect, except that it rather served to increase the confusion. For Phyllis Tressider, crumpling up a sheet of paper into a ball, flung it at her with an injunction to "Shut up, dear old thing!" and the rest of the form promptly followed her example. In a few seconds the head of the Lower Fifth was almost snowed under with missiles of various sorts.
"I say—stop it!" she gasped, dodging an exercise book, only to receive a piece of india-rubber full in the eye. Then, as a quick step sounded in the passage outside, she sat up straight in her desk in an attitude of sudden attention.
"Cave—Miss Parrot!" she whispered hoarsely. In a moment the Lower Fifth was sitting rigidly at attention again, every sign of the late battle cleared out of sight as though by a miracle. Only Geraldine, new to scenes like this, not realising what this sudden transformation might mean, was still sitting twisted round in her desk in the position from which she had been watching the uproar in interested amusement.
She soon realised what the sudden change meant though, when Miss Parrot, the form-mistress of the Lower Fifth, known throughout the school as "Pretty Polly" from her name and her supposed resemblance to the bird in question, came briskly into the room. The mistress's quick ears had caught the sound of the conflict from afar, and she at once pounced upon Geraldine's unconventional attitude as being the only sign of disorder her sharp eyes could perceive.
"Geraldine Wilmott, what are you doing, sitting like that in class? Turn round properly at once. I heard a great deal of noise as I came along—has anything been happening?"
There was no answer to her question; and after surveying the virtuously innocent faces before her the mistress was about to let the matter drop—reflecting that after all it was the first day of term, when a little leniency might be advisable—when her attention was attracted by the sight of a screwed-up paper ball lying on the floor just in front of Geraldine's desk. All the other missiles had been dexterously cleared away; but Geraldine, not realising any necessity for doing so, had failed to remove the one sign of the battle that had fallen near her desk. Indeed, she had hardly noticed that any had fallen there. Miss Parrot was of a very orderly nature. In her classroom nothing was ever permitted to be out of place, and the sight of the ball of paper was too much for her to pass over.