"Bother!" said Muriel, as she and Monica and one or two other members of the Pink team walked off the field together. "That means we'll have to play it again. We ought to have won easily, too. I messed up an easy shot for goal in the first half—if I'd only got that we should have been all right."
"Or if that little ass, Gerry Wilmott, hadn't funked," remarked Monica, rather bitterly. It was she who had given the casting vote in favour of Gerry's inclusion in the team, and she was feeling more or less responsible for the fiasco.
"Oh, well, I don't know," said Muriel leniently. "The kid didn't want to play, I will say that for her. I practically forced her to. It was my fault, I suppose, really, for making her do it against her will."
"You weren't to know that she was such a little coward, though," said Monica. Curiously enough it was Monica who was the more down upon Gerry for her exhibition of fright—Monica, who might have been expected to have had some sympathy with the shy new girl whom, up to now, she had rather taken under her wing. As it was, it was Muriel, brilliant, splendid Muriel, who had never known what it was to have an attack of funk in her life, who was the more inclined to make excuses for her. Ever since the mouse episode in the dormitory, which Muriel had since recognised to have been real terror and not merely affectation, as she had at first suspected, upon Gerry's part, the head girl had been observing Gerry with some interest, and the girl's genuine self-depreciation in her study that morning had touched her more than she quite knew.
"Poor kiddie, I expect she's feeling pretty cut up about it," she said sympathetically. And she actually waited until Gerry, forlornly lagging in the rear of the other players, came up, in order to speak a kind word to the disgraced member of her team.
Gerry, absorbed in her own miserable thoughts, did not see the head girl until she was nearly upon her. Then she drew up short with a nervous gesture, expecting a reprimand. But Muriel made haste to remove the apprehension she saw in Gerry's eyes.
"Come on, kid; you seem to have got left behind," she said gently. "Come and walk with me." And she slipped her hand through the younger girl's arm.
"Oh, Muriel—I am so sorry——" began poor Gerry, the tears coming into her eyes. But Muriel cut short the impending apology.
"Oh, rubbish!" she said. "Don't be sorry. Just do better another time. That's all I want. After all, we haven't lost the Cup, you know. We shall have another shot for it next week or the week after, and you must try and do better then."
"Oh no, no! Not in a match again! Please, please not, Muriel!" cried Gerry, with such a note of anguish in her tone that Muriel realised that this was not a case for the maxim, "You can do it if you only try," with which she was used to encourage people who in her opinion needed encouragement. In a vague sort of way it came home to her that Gerry's mentality was rather outside her experience of schoolgirl psychology, and for the moment she forbore to press the already overtaxed girl further.