“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Marion Crandall is the girl that gave Bessie Bartlett’s address for hers so that she could come to Marston—and Bess let her do it, too.”
“One of my Maries! And never told me! You didn’t know it, did you, Mary?” Jacquette asked, turning to the girl at her side.
“I didn’t, Jacquette,” put in Mary Barnes.
“Nor I, either. It’s a perfect shock to me,” said Marie Stanwood.
But Jacquette was watching Mary Elliott.
“Yes, I did,” Mary owned, miserable in her honesty. “But it was before I knew you, and Marion made me promise never to tell. She said it was no harm; it was just a technical rule that kept her from coming to Marston because she lived a block too far in a certain direction.”
“I knew it, too. I heard Marion ask Bess if she could borrow her address,” put in Mamie Coolidge, avoiding Jacquette’s eyes, but determined not to let little Mary Elliott take the blame alone. “It didn’t seem wrong to me, at the time, either. It looks different, now. Marion said her father knew she was going to do it, and he just laughed and thought it was cute. But of course I never dreamed she was going to sign her mother’s name to her report card, and then tell those awful yarns to Mr. Branch.”
Jacquette’s eyes looked black instead of hazel, and she was every inch the “Queen” as the girls fell into a semi-circle before her and obediently answered her questions.
“Why, you see,” Blanche Gross took up the story, “Marion cut a lot of her classes the first few weeks after she was initiated Sigma Pi. I suppose the sorority importance went to her head a little, the way it does, sometimes, you know, and at the end of the month her report was so bad that she got worried about it and signed her mother’s name to it instead of taking it home. But her room-teacher suspected the signature, and Mr. Branch wrote a letter to Marion’s mother at the address she had given, and it was Bessie’s house, of course, and she and Marion got the letter from the postman, and tore it up, and then Mr. Branch called them to the office, and questioned them, and they got all muddled up, and——”