“I cannot forgive you,” she cried. “How could you let me sing? My father died to-day, and what will they think of me when they hear that I sang just the same! I will not forgive you.”
The stern words were followed by violent sobs.
This outburst was so unlike the lively, amiable Polly that her friends were only too glad when Julia’s carriage was announced; and leaning on Clarissa’s arm, she was led away, closely followed by Julia.
The girls who were left behind speculated as to what Polly would do; whether she would start for home immediately; whether her feeling would continue to be bitter toward Ruth for withholding the telegram.
“Yet it doesn’t seem altogether like Ruth,” said Elspeth. “Fond as I am of Polly, I feel that there may be some mistake. I am sure that Ruth could not have known about the telegram; could not possibly have held it from Polly if she knew what was in it.”
But unluckily among those whose thoughts were favorable to Ruth, Julia was not to be counted. Her disapproval of Ruth’s intimacy with Annabel now seemed to have been well founded. She felt sure that unintentionally Ruth had adopted Annabel’s rather easy standards of duty to others. “The greatest good of the greatest number,” Annabel was apt to offer as an excuse for some action which other girls called selfish. For when criticised she would try to prove that while one or perhaps two girls were injured by something that she had said or done, an indefinite number of indefinite people would approve, and therefore might be benefited by it. Annabel had a smattering of philosophy, as she had of other subjects, obtained before studying them; and had she learned more of the philosopher whom she quoted almost unconsciously, she would have known that above all other rules he set the Golden Rule. To do unto others as she would have others do to her was certainly not a guiding star of Annabel’s conduct.
Thus, after all, there had been an element of tragedy in the operetta that had once meant only sunshine to those who were working and planning for it. Polly Porson, speeding Southward, would have felt doubly forlorn had not Clarissa been with her. For the Western girl had insisted on going with her friend, and though her absence from Cambridge at this time meant some loss in the coming examinations, she would not have listened had any one attempted to dissuade her from going. She did her part, too, in softening Polly’s feeling toward Ruth, and she was surprised to find how earnestly she could champion the cause of a girl who had so often seemed anything but friendly toward her. But while she knew that Ruth had taken no pains to conceal a certain dislike for her, she realized that it was a case of mere personal antipathy, unaccountable, perhaps, as such things often are, or to be accounted for by the fact that in every way the two girls had received a very different training.
“But I’m sure that Ruth wouldn’t do a mean thing, and to have kept that telegram from you would have been mean beyond description.”
Polly, absorbed in her sorrow, and thinking more about the meeting with her mother and little sisters, had little to say, although firmly fixed in her mind was the thought that Ruth really had served her own ends by holding the telegram from her.
Clarissa was soon back at Cambridge, and by good luck lost not a single examination through her absence. She would not even admit that her sudden trip, by interfering with her study, had lowered her standing. When the blue-books were all in she was able to announce triumphantly that her average was higher than ever before. “Which proves,” she had said to Elspeth, “that cramming is a luxury and not a necessity.”