"U-m-m-m," mused her father. "Well—there was certainly some kissing in ours."
"This is outrageous!" cried Miss Merriwayne. "Let me pass!"
With a smile that would have been insolent if it had not been so brooding, Jaffrey Bretton spread his arms across the doorway.
"You are a bigger girl, Clytie, than you used to be," he said. "You can't slip out of this situation quite as easily as you slipped from the other."
With a shrug of his shoulders he turned and stared into space again. When he glanced back at his companions it was with just a little bit of a start.
"Oh, yes—I forgot," he said. "There was a door—that time, that wasn't blocked. And the other boy jumped through the window. . . . What possible haven was there left," he asked, "for the panic- stricken little room-mate except in my arms? She smelt of 192 violets, I remember," he mused, "and her throat was very white. Nobody ever knew about the presence of the other boy. And only the four of us knew about Cly—'Miss Merriwayne' I would say. But if Miss Merriwayne had come back," he quickened ever so slightly, "and acknowledged frankly that she, also, had been present, the school authorities, I suppose, would hardly have judged the unintentional tête-à-tête as harshly—as they did. . . . Even at the eleventh hour, if she had been willing to come back and acknowledge it or at the twelfth for the matter of that—or even at one o'clock or two, while the outraged Powers harangued on the case . . . . But by three o'clock, that timorous little room-mate, seeing no other exit, slashed a door through her little white throat and fled away.
"So you see, Daphne," he smiled, "that even across a mistake like that——"
"You mean," blanched Daphne, "that——"
Like a man straining very slightly toward more air the new Dean's throat muscles lifted.
On Kaire's face alone the grin remained half a grin, anyway. 193