"Well, we shall have some marks to give in, anyway," said Jack, when the Lower Fifth was released at eleven o'clock recess to refresh itself with cocoa and biscuits in the dining-hall. "Better have bad marks to give in, I suppose, than none at all!"
"I wonder what she'll do when it comes to literature and she finds we haven't prepared for that, either," said Hilda, with rather a tragic expression on her face. Hilda's conscience was troubling her a good deal. She had very lively visions of what the headmistress would probably say about her responsibility as head of the form, when the matter should get to her ears.
"Treat us the same way as she did in algebra class, I expect," said Jack, with a grimace. "Wasn't it a rotten thing to go and do? I'd much rather she had raved at us like she did over the German—that really was rather fun!"
"It was rather cute of her, all the same," said Dorothy, with a sort of grudging admiration. "It made me feel rather mean when she settled down to correcting those papers like that. If she hadn't been quite so lavish with her bad marks all the time, I almost believe I might have repented a bit then."
"Oh, you'll repent all right, later on. Don't you worry about that," said Jack philosophically. "You just wait until Miss Oakley has given us a jawing. She'll make you feel an utter worm; you just see if she doesn't!"
"I know she will!" said Hilda, with a groan. "I say, don't you think we'd better give in and tell Miss Burton that we're sorry? There's a perfectly awful time waiting for us if we go on with the strike."
"We've gone too far to draw back now," said Dorothy. "So we may as well go on a little longer and see if we can't accomplish something. We've set out to show Miss Burton that she's come to an up-to-date public school, and that her old-fashioned kindergarten methods won't go down here. Don't let's give in before the campaign's properly begun!"
"Courage, mes amis," cried Jack gaily, waving a biscuit over her head. "The worst is still to come, I admit, but we are martyrs in a good cause. We'll teach Miss Burton a lesson before we've done! And if we burn our own fingers in the doing of it—well, we knew we shouldn't get off scot-free before we began, didn't we?"
"Anyway, we shall have a bit of a run for our money," observed Nita Fleming, who had only just joined the group. "Miss Oakley's gone away till Wednesday—I was in the hall just now and saw her drive off. That means Thursday before the row can come off, at the very earliest."
"Hurrah!" shouted Jack. "If we all hold together till then we shall have broken Miss Burton's spirit, and shown her that she can't treat us as though we were just a parcel of kids. Thursday—why, who knows, we may have brought her to terms by then!"