“Why, yes, but——”
“Oh, it’s different with you! Your family understands. But you ought to have seen how angry my father was when he read that article.”
“Angry? At the Board, do you mean?”
“Oh, no! It was the first he had ever heard about the secret societies getting that injunction against the Board, and he said it was an unheard-of piece of insolence, and that he should think every boy and girl connected with it would have been expelled, and that he felt disgraced to see me wearing this pin and he wasn’t going to have a daughter of his belonging to an organisation that was in antagonism to the school authorities, and——”
“But, Mary, didn’t you tell him there was no such thing as resigning from Sigma Pi?”
“Oh, I did!” Mary had shrunk back into a dark corner of the hall where she could mop her eyes without being noticed. “I told him I’d have to be expelled from the sorority and that would disgrace me before the whole school, and everything else, but nothing made any difference. He says the disgrace is in belonging to such a society. He’s given me three days to make up my mind to leave Sigma Pi of my own accord and if I haven’t done it then, I think he’s going to make me. Oh, Jacquette!” Mary began to sob again. “I haven’t any mother, you know. There’s just a housekeeper.”
“You poor little thing!” said Jacquette, drawing Mary’s arm through hers protectingly. “Here, take my handkerchief. Yours is soaking wet. There! Now, come out in the air, and eat some luncheon. I’m thinking of something that I believe will comfort you, but I can’t tell you about it just yet. I wouldn’t say much to the other girls, until you’ve heard my plan. Just stop worrying until to-morrow, can’t you, please? You must, you know, if the Queen says so.”
“Oh, but I can’t bear being expelled and having the girls not like me! Jacquette, will you have to turn against me? Will I have to give up being one of the Queen’s Maries?”
“I should say not!” Jacquette declared, with a sudden sense of shame as she recognised her own old fears in Mary’s panic. “You leave the whole thing to me.”
“Oh, you don’t know my father!” Mary protested, but she dried her tears and smiled, in spite of herself, as she followed the Queen into the bracing October air.