Up in her own corridor Betty met Madeline Ayres. “Back so soon?” said Madeline, who refused to take Glee Club concerts seriously. “I’ve had the most delicious evening, reading in solitary splendor and eating apples that I didn’t have to pass around. I’m sure your concert wasn’t half so amusing. How did Georgia’s song go?”
“Finely,” said Betty without enthusiasm. “Did she tell you about it while you helped her dress?”
“No, for I didn’t help her. I went over to the Hilton right after dinner. Lucile told me, in a valiant attempt to persuade me that I was foolish to miss the concert.”
“Oh,” said Betty limply, opening her own door.
Madeline hadn’t seen the pendant then. Probably some freshman who didn’t know about Nita’s loss had helped Georgia to dress. Well, what did that matter? She had Georgia’s own word that the pin was a gift. Besides it was absurd to think that she would take Nita’s pin and wear it right here at Harding. And yet—it was just the same and the one little pearl was gone. But a person who would steal Nita’s pin, wouldn’t make a present of it to Georgia. Then the pin couldn’t be Nita’s.
“I’m getting to be a horrid, suspicious person,” Betty told the green lizard. “I won’t think about it another minute. I won’t, I won’t!”
And she didn’t that night, for she fell asleep almost before her head touched the pillow. Next morning she woke in the midst of a long complicated dream about Georgia and the green lizard. Georgia had stolen him and put a ring around his tail, and the lizard was protesting vigorously in a metallic shriek that turned out, after awhile, to be the Belden House breakfast-bell jangling outside her door.
“They never ring the rising-bell as loud as that,” wailed Betty, when she had consulted her clock and made sure that she had slept over. Before she was dressed Georgia Ames appeared, bringing a delicious breakfast tray.
“Helen said that you have a nine o’clock recitation,” she exclaimed, “and I thought you probably hadn’t studied for it and would be in a dreadful hurry.”
Betty thanked her, feeling very guilty. Georgia was wearing a plain brown jumper dress, with no ornament of any kind, not even a pin to fasten her collar; and she looked as cool and self-possessed and cheerful as usual. In the sober light of morning it seemed even more than absurd to suppose that she was anything but a nice, jolly girl, like Rachel and K. and Madeline,—the sort of girl that you associated with Harding College and with the “Merry Hearts” and asked to box parties with a nice Yale man, who liked her and invited her to his prom.