That night, while a disapproving Matron, armed with an immense bottle of sal volatile, stood by, urging bed for everyone, Joey Graham was cheered at tea by the entire school.
CHAPTER XXII
The Great Election
It was wonderfully quiet in the Queen's Hall, considering that six hundred girls were assembled there. Of course, there was not the absolute pin-drop silence of the times when Miss Conyngham read prayers, but that was not to be expected because The Election—(it was always the Election at Redlands)—was in progress. For the last hour there had been a steady tramp of feet going to and returning from the platform on which there sat in silent dignity the "Heads of the Upper and Lower School."
Before each was a large waste-paper basket, and into one or other of those receptacles each girl dropped a folded paper containing the name of a candidate for the highest dignity the school could offer.
The Head of the Upper School must be chosen from the Upper or the Lower Sixth; the Head of the Lower from Remove II. A or B, that was the one restriction. It gave a choice of forty girls in the Upper School and of sixty in the Lower. Every College girl had the right to vote, with the exception of the retiring dignitaries; even Tiddles had her buff slip, and was laboriously printing something on it with a much-sucked pencil. No Redlands girl would have forgone the privilege of voting for the world.
Six weeks had gone by since that exciting 31st of October; six wonderful weeks for Joey. Weeks when extraordinary things happened; among others a day in town with Colonel Sturt (who wasn't gruff at all) and with Cousin Greta, when she was taken to the War Office to answer the keen, interested questions of a couple of splendid-looking staff officers, who were very kind to her, and promised that the business of searching for her father should be put in hand without a second's delay. They shook hands with Joey, and congratulated her when they had finished. She went to lunch at the Ritz afterwards, feeling deliriously happy, and much older. The only bar to her perfect bliss was the fact that she might not tell Mums about that wonderful hope forthwith. Cousin Greta said it would be cruel, until the hope was a certainty, and Cousin Greta had been so wonderfully kind and understanding of late that Joey felt sure she must be right. Still not even the lovely little gold wrist-watch bracelet which her cousin chose for her in Bond Street, when lunch was over, could make up for having to keep silence to Mums. It was a better consolation when Lady Greta said she was going to ask Mums down for the "Old Girls' Day" at the end of the term, so that Joey could show her the school and her friends, and they could travel back to Scotland together. Joey thought it would be a particularly pleasant thing to show the school to Mums just now, when everyone was being so extraordinarily nice to her. Even Ingrid Latimer and her friend Joan Chichester, that big Sixth Former who had put Joey on the table the day that she and Gabby and Noreen were going to meet Miss Craigie, condescended to a good deal of notice. Joey felt her cup of pride would brim over if she could bring Mums up to these majestic people and say, carelessly, "I'd like you to know my mother," as she had heard Joan Chichester do when her people came down at Mid-term. Of course, in old days it would have been unheard-of cheek for any member of the Lower School, except for Gabrielle, who breakfasted with Miss Conyngham when school matters needed attention, and could say, "I say, Ingrid, oughtn't we...."
It was that "we" which was so wonderful, really; much more so than breakfasting with the Head!