The organ recital was over by the time the three reached the Lower Fifth sitting-room again, and the members of the form had returned to their usual Sunday evening occupations. Grumbling greatly at their affliction, Jack and Nita got out their pens and paper and made a beginning at their punishment task, for they knew that it would be all that they could do to get the lines finished by the required time. The rest of the Lower Fifth listened sympathetically to their tale of woe, and many were the censures upon the new mistress for her unsportsman-like manner of dealing with the affair.
"Of course she ought to have lectured you herself, and let you off with a conduct mark at most," exclaimed Dorothy Pemberton. "Fancy taking you up to the Head for a little thing like that!"
"But what a silly ass you must have been, Gerry Wilmott, to go letting them drop just when she was going away," said Phyllis Tressider. Phyllis still bore a grudge against Gerry because of the rowing the head girl had given her on Gerry's behalf, and she had acquiesced very unwillingly into taking the new girl into favour.
"I couldn't help it, my pocket burst," said Gerry. And Jack, although she herself blamed Gerry a little for the accident, hastened to take her part.
"Shut up, Phyllis, and leave Gerry alone. It wasn't her fault. It was that beast of a Miss Burton! Never mind, though, we'll be revenged upon her to-morrow. Won't she be wild when she finds that we've none of us done a single stroke of the work she set!"
"She'll report us to Miss Oakley, right away—you see if she doesn't," prophesied Hilda Burns gloomily. "If she'll report a little thing like roasting chestnuts, she's sure to take a big matter like refusing to do our work up to the Head, too. We're in for an awful time, in my opinion. I think we were asses to have done it. It would have been better to have got even with her in some safer way."
"Well, it's too late now to begin repenting about it," said Jack cheerfully. "And, anyway, we're all in it together, whatever happens." And then she and Nita and Gerry settled down to their punishment lines.