Cousin Greta interrupted. "I know, dear; John told me. Don't think any more about it; I am only too thankful you are safe. You must come over on another Sunday very soon, and we will try and give you a really happy time."
Joey felt more choky than she had done through all Miss Conyngham's harangue.
"It's no end brickish of you," she stammered, forgetting to speak in what she thought was a telephone voice, and becoming much more audible in consequence. "You were fearfully kind to-day, and it's frightfully nice of you not to be mad!"
She rang off, and went to find her chocolates, feeling distinctly happier. She met Noreen in the passage, and thrust the box into her hands.
"Look here, you'd better keep them and orgie," she said. "I'm not to talk for a week in dorm."
"What a sickening shame! But we'll keep the chocs till the week's up," Noreen said cheerfully. "My hat-box will do; Matron never pokes her nose into that. Keep smiling, old thing; it's rotten, I know, but we'll simply have the bust of our lives when the week's up, and you're clear."
Joey went up to bed directly after supper that night as commanded, but feeling less depressed than might have been expected. For one thing, Miss Conyngham had addressed her in quite an ordinary tone at supper; for another, Cousin Greta had been so unexpectedly nice. And Noreen's friendship came in a good third. Joey looked forward determinedly to next Sunday, when chocolates should be eaten in wild profusion in the watches of the night, to the accompaniment of the nervous young man's gruesome stories of what happened to people wandering casually about the Deeps.