Following the direction of her glance the girls were just in time to see the freckled face and mean little eyes of Amanda Peabody disappear from the window.
"Oh, that sneak!" cried Laura in a rage, rushing across to the window while the other girls followed close at her heels. "I wish I were a boy and she were another one. I'd just show her!"
"Well, now she will tell and we couldn't run away even if we wanted to," said Billie, sinking down on a bench and looking at them wistfully. "Of course we wouldn't really have wanted to," she added, after a minute of uncomfortable silence. "Only it makes me mad to have to do the right thing. Oh, I don't see why somebody doesn't run that Amanda person out of town," she went on, doubling up her fists and looking as if it might have been just as well for that "Amanda person" that she was not there at the minute.
"Teddy says he calls her 'Nanny,'" said Violet, with a flash of humor, "because it 'gets her goat.'"
"Sounds just like Ted," said Billie, with a smile. Then her face sobered again as she realized the gravity of the situation.
"Of course I'll have to make it good," she said, going over to the pieces again and regarding them mournfully. "But how in the world am I ever going to get together a hundred dollars? It might just as well be a thousand as far as I'm concerned." The last was a wail.
"Won't your father give you the money?" asked Laura, for to Laura's father a hundred dollars was only a drop in the bucket.
But Billie only shook her head while her face became still more grave.
"He would if he could," she said, "but I heard him say only the other day that times are hard and everything is terribly expensive, and I know he is worried. Oh, girls, I'm in a terrible fix!"
"I know you are, honey," said Violet, coming over and putting a comforting arm about her. "But there must be some way that we can fix things all right."