Hildegarde had stopped, stared, and was seized with uncontrollable giggles. Madeleine Smulsky, hearing these demonstrations, got up out of bed and made all haste to thrust her bare toes through the banisters, and crane a tousled head far enough over the rail to discover what was happening below. Her ecstatic merriment induced Miss Wayne to come further into the hall, and reprove her with a supple young finger stiffly crooked, and speaking not only with a cold in the head, but with that intolerable click in the nose of the sufferer from chronic catarrh—
“I would lige yeou do observe there is a sbezial beaudy aboud the laws of bathebadigs—” Again the dreadful noise in the impudent little nose. Madeleine’s attempt to suppress her laughter brought on a fit of coughing, which, with a spasmodic suddenness, choked and died in her throat. For all of a sudden there were three figures in the hall below, and one of them was the real Miss MacIver, saying to herself in miniature:
“And now, Miss Wayne, you may take off my shawl, and my skirt, and my glasses.” (Not a syllable about the opulent front.) “And in ten minutes go and report to the principal.”
“It was the teacher of arithmetic to the life, only it was Bella Wayne”
As the real Miss MacIver, six feet of indignation, turned away trembling with fury, she looked back an instant over her shoulder to say: “You or I, Biss Wayne, bust leave Valdivia—”
But Bella had already vanished into the room of penitence, and was feverishly pulling off her strange habiliments. The bare toes of Miss Smulsky had been hurriedly withdrawn from between the banisters, and any girl but Hildegarde Mar would have been fleeing down the staircase, “and so home.” But she walked quietly away, her large deliberateness even a little emphasized as she went, weighed down by fearful speculation as to what form of retribution would overtake the wicked, new girl.
Hildegarde went to school the next morning ten minutes earlier than usual. No one yet in the big school-room, so she wandered restlessly through the empty halls, wishing she dared go up-stairs and compare notes with Madeleine. From a window at the back, looking out on a group of eucalyptus trees and a mass of syringa, she saw little Bella Wayne sitting very subdued on the topmost of two stone steps; slate on knee and pencil poised, but eyes fastened on a woodpecker tap-tap-tapping at the tree.
Hildegarde went out and spoke kindly to the unlucky little girl. “What’s happened since—?”
“Nothing much,” and Bella put up her chin.