“How are you, Polly?” she called, pleasantly. “Isn’t it a gem of a day?”
Polly looked at Crullers, doubled up beneath the blankets, and rose determinedly. But she left the shortcake in the basket within easy reach. If anything could take away Crullers’ trouble, it would be that.
“Could I talk with—you, Miss Murray please?” she asked. “I came expressly to see you.”
“Won’t it keep until Monday, Polly?” smiled back Jean, unpinning her black sailor hat, and letting down her long skirt. “I’ve only half an hour to dress for dinner. You know on Fridays I run away after the girls are through. This is my one weekly holiday.”
Polly leaned forward, looking up at the tall, slender figure in unconcealed admiration. Dearly did Polly love blow-away hair, as she would have called it. Curly, fluffy masses of blonde hair just verging on red, swept back from Jean’s low, broad forehead. Her face was rather broad, and her mouth was broad too, but so was her smile, and her teeth were even and white as new corn. There was a fine sprinkling of freckles over her nose. Her eyes were blue, not gray, nor hazel, but blue as forget-me-nots, and they always looked straight at you without blinking.
“I don’t want to bother you,” Polly said doubtfully. “It’s only about Crullers,—I mean Jane Daphne Adams. You know we girls always call her Crullers.”
“Jane Daphne is on my mind too, Polly,” Miss Murray rejoined. “Come up to my room, Polly, and we’ll talk it over.”
As they left the dormitory, Crullers’ tousled head and red moist face appeared from beneath the quilt, and she reached for the green basket and its contents with a sigh. She knew she was in the wrong, and that even Polly would not uphold her, when she heard the truth. And it troubled her, for Polly’s opinion was her court of last appeal in all things at Calvert Hall.
Ever since she had come there as a pupil the previous year, she had been under Polly’s wing, for none of the other girls could put up with her slow ways and blunders. And yet, as she sat up in the bed now, eating the shortcake with sad and deliberate relish, and dropping salt tears on the whipped cream, she could not see why everybody should have “jumped on” her just because she had rescued a stray cat, and hidden it in the dormitory closet. It was a live cat. She had fully intended feeding it. And it wasn’t her fault that the lock had snapped. She had been told to appear for sentence in Miss Calvert’s study the following morning, and there she had faced both the principal and Miss Murray. The latter was in charge of the dormitory Tuesdays and Fridays, and it was on a Tuesday night the cat had been found.
“Jane Daphne Adams,” Miss Calvert had said, in her stateliest manner, “you will bring my gray hair in sorrow to the grave. Ever since you came to the Hall, there has been trouble.”