“I’d explain to Miss Dick. I’d ask her to treat you as she does the oldest and most responsible girls—to trust you.”
“She treats them all a good deal like infants,” murmured Frisky. She turned to Betty. “Thank you, Miss Wales. I don’t know why you should do so much for me. If you are looking out for my good behavior, I’ll certainly try not to make you sorry or to get you in a fix with Miss Dick.” Frisky laughed again.
Betty took the sleepy Francisca home with her, and risked routing somebody up at Miss Dick’s to make her report. Miss Dick herself answered her. “I found your note on my return,” she explained. “One of Miss Fenton’s roommates had grown worried and spoken to me earlier in the day. Miss Carson and I went down in the afternoon. No, we were not provided with the company’s name, and we could not place them. Miss Carson is staying all night—the detective reports to her hourly. I shall wire her at once, of course. Miss Wales, you have done me an inestimable service in helping me to fulfil my trust to the child’s parents. In the morning you will come over? Certainly, Miss Wales. Anything, anything! I am very deeply in your debt.”
Betty smiled, a little later, over the picture of the dignified Miss Dick, the subdued Kitty Carson, and a perturbed detective pursuing a phantom theatrical troupe and a pretty girl through the devious ways of the Junction.
“But I didn’t find them,” she reflected modestly. “It was Jim. I’m never the one that does things. It’s just my good luck and my good friends.”
CHAPTER XIX
ARCHITECT’S FINAL PLANS—CONSIDERED
Betty Wales danced merrily across the campus to her office. It was commencement Monday. Betty hadn’t meant to stay over at first, but the affairs of the teachers’ agency were not quite settled, and they had kept her. Besides, Lucile Merrifield graduated, Georgia was a junior usher, Helen was to take her Master’s degree, and 19— was coming back “in bunches,” as Bob elegantly phrased it, for an “informal between-years” reunion. And finally Jim Watson was coming to make his much-heralded call on this very Monday evening. Betty had taken him to 19—’s own Glee Club concert, and he had suggested celebrating the anniversary, much to the disgust of the B. C. A.’s and the rest of the old 19— crowd, who found no occasion quite complete unless they could have Betty Wales in their midst.
Half-way to her office she was hailed by President Wallace. “You’ll be back next year, of course?” he asked. “The Morton couldn’t do without you.”
Betty blushed and laughed. “I hoped I could escape without being asked that, because I don’t know. Mother and father say they are all right, but I must look them over and be quite sure before I decide to leave them again.”
“Very well, only be quite sure also that we need you here,” the President told her, and Betty hurried on, thinking hard about the next year at Morton Hall. It would certainly be very nice, with the Mystery explained and happy, Miss Romance departed to make a home for her devoted suitor, the Digs beginning to appreciate the inherent reasonableness of obeying rules, the Thorn no longer prickly, and the Goop boarding with a married sister who had providentially come to live in Harding.