Eugenia considered. “I suppose that’s the only thing to do. If I hurry I can get there before dinner. Between tea and dinner is her good-natured time.” Eugenia pulled up the raincoat, which was much too long for her, and started off.
Half an hour later she was back again, shivering forlornly with the cold and choking with tears.
“I told her. I told her exactly how I happened to lose it, because she asked me, and I never thought how awful it would look. She says I’m a cheat, and don’t deserve more time. She says she’ll flunk me in the course, and she hopes I’ll flunk enough other things so I can’t stay in college. Oh, Miss Wales, what shall I do? I told my father I was all caught up. He doesn’t know about midyears. I guess that wasn’t honest either, to say I was caught up before I’d passed the exams. If I’m flunked out now I shan’t ever dare go home. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do? What shall I do?”
Betty tucked the forlorn, weeping little bundle into a chair, heaped more wood on the fire that she had been trying to put out, brewed hot tea, and hunted through the larder for tempting “left-overs” that would make up an appetizing little supper for two. When Madeline and the smallest sister came to see, as Dorothy put it, whether the ploshkin had caught and killed Betty, she sent them away with a hastily whispered explanation.
“Now first,” she told Eugenia, “you’re to stop crying or you’ll make yourself sick, and then where will your midyears be? And secondly you’re to eat what I’ve cooked, because it isn’t polite to act as if you didn’t like my cooking. And thirdly you’re to escort me as far as the door of the Davidson. I’m going to see Miss Raymond. I’m sure you misunderstood part of what she said, because she isn’t the kind to speak that way. If she has made up her mind to flunk you, I don’t know that I can do anything, but I’m going to try.”
“Oh, you mustn’t bother,” moaned Eugenia. “It’s no use. I suppose it was cheating. You said it was yourself.”
“I ought to have told you specially not to bring the ‘final’ theme to me,” Betty told her. “And if you did leave it here, why, I’m responsible in a way for its loss. I shall tell Miss Raymond that. I can’t have you fail because something you left with me has disappeared off the face of the earth.”
On their way Betty told Eugenia to walk ahead slowly while she ran up to bid Dorothy good-night.
“I just hate to go,” she told Madeline. “I don’t know Miss Raymond very well. If it was Miss Ferris, I should know just what to say; but I’m afraid Miss Raymond will think it was partly my doings that Eugenia brought me the theme. I just hate to be mixed up in anything that isn’t perfectly straight.”
“Then let her get out of it as best she can herself.”