"Well, you may keep back enough money to pay expenses," conceded the head girl. "Reckon out exactly how many yards of ribbon you've bought and how many favours you've sold, and then bring the balance of the money to me to be put into the missionary-box. And please remember for the future that you're English schoolgirls—not beastly little Jews."
With which parting remark she stalked off with much magisterial dignity, leaving three very crushed small girls behind her.
However, the three had the consolation of regaining the money they had outlaid upon their project, and also of having started a very popular scheme. The idea of the favours caught on. The members of the Green Dormitory were immediately bitten with the desire to sport green rosettes, and drawers were ransacked, and finally permission obtained for a messenger to be sent into the town to purchase a sufficiency of green ribbon to manufacture favours for the rival team and its supporters. Before the morning was over nearly every girl in the school sported a favour of one colour or the other. Pink favours predominated, partly because of the start obtained by the early venders, and partly because the Pink Dormitory was Muriel's dormitory. The head girl was far and away the most popular person in the school, far out-rivalling Alice Metcalfe, the Green Dormitory's captain, in the girls' affections. Still, the Greens had quite a fair show of ribbons—enough at any rate to make a good "shout" for their side when the match should begin.
Gerry Wilmott, alone of her team, did not wear a pink rosette. She wanted one badly, but she had not quite liked to ask for one, and the three little girls who were selling them carefully refrained from coming near the girl who was known as a coward and a sneak throughout the school. Gerry looked at them very wistfully once or twice when they were in her vicinity, but in spite of her desire to be decorated with the colours of the dormitory for which she was to play, she did not dare to risk a rebuff by going up to them. She would have gone favourless up to the field itself if it had not been for Monica Deane, her next-door neighbour in the dormitory. Monica had purchased a favour quite early in the day, much to the distress of little Vera Davies, her devoted admirer, who presented her with one just before the match began, which she had made herself.
"Please, Monica, wear mine!" pleaded the little girl, coming into Monica's cubicle where the senior was changing into the gym dress which was the regulation hockey kit at Wakehurst Priory. "I begged a bit of the ribbon from Gladys and Betty and Marjorie, and made it for you all myself, to bring you luck! Please take your other one off and wear mine!"
"All right, kiddie, of course I'll have to wear it since you made it for me yourself," said Monica good-naturedly. "I'll give the other one away to somebody else, if there's anybody left in the school who hasn't got one."
Then a sudden thought struck her.
"Gerry, have you got one, or would you like mine?" she called over the cubicle wall, remembering that she had seen the Lower Fifth girl undecorated earlier in the day.
"No; I haven't got one. I'd like it very much," answered Gerry, in rather a low voice. The next moment the small pink favour came fluttering over the partition that divided her cubicle from Monica's.
"There you are, then," said the senior girl.