CHAPTER XVII
THE MYSTERY SOLVED
Mrs. Post had the grippe. “Why couldn’t I have waited until the spring vacation?” she sighed forlornly. “Then this house would be empty, and my daughter—the one who’s a nurse—was coming up anyway to visit me. And now I’m bothering everybody and making lots of extra trouble.”
Betty reassured her tactfully. “It’s not the busy season for Student’s Aid secretaries,” she said. “Whatever of your work I specially don’t like, I shall saddle on some girl. They’re all crazy to do things for you. It’s worth being ill once in a while to see how much people think of you.”
Late that afternoon Betty remembered that she had forgotten to distribute towels on the fourth floor, and went up to see about it. The Mystery’s door was open, she noticed, and a group of fourth floor girls were inside, eagerly admiring a dress that had just come to the Thorn from home.
Betty threw them a merry word of greeting and went on to the linen closet. It was a cloudy afternoon and the tiny high window let in very little light. “I must write to Jim to complain of his dark linen-presses,” she thought, with a smile. And then, reaching out her hand to draw the curtain away from some shelves, she jumped back with a scream of terror. Her hand had hit the head of somebody who was crouched in a heap behind the curtains. Betty’s cry brought half a dozen girls on the run to the linen-closet door.
“It’s nothing,” Betty told them, clinging to the door-post to steady herself, for she was trembling with fright. “That is—now, girls, don’t scream or faint or do anything foolish. Some one had hidden in there—some girl in the house, perhaps, for fun. Whoever it is won’t hurt us here all together in broad daylight. Now come out, please,” called Betty, raising her voice and looking hard at the curtains.
There was a moment of awful stillness and then a tall girl straightened to her full height behind the quivering curtains and came forward, flushing hotly, to the door. It was Helena Mason. She paid no attention to Betty and the girls about her but, looking over their heads, faced Esther Bond, who stood watching the scene with a curious air of detachment from the door of her room. And the look that Helena Mason gave her said as plainly as words could have done, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
But the look the Mystery sent back said, “I am beyond hating you or any one else.”
There was a long silence. Betty and the girls with her were too amazed to speak, and Helena Mason stood quietly defiant, as if daring any one to question her. At last the Thorn, gay in her new dress, broke the tension.
“Come on down to my room, girls, and finish your inspection of me there,” she suggested. “Miss Wales doesn’t need any more protection. We’re just in the way here now.”