"Are we going down to breakfast?" asked Laura, as the breakfast gong rang.
"I suppose we'd better," answered Caroline Brant, her eyes looking tired and red-rimmed under the spectacles. "We have to eat, anyway. After we get through we can come up here and decide what we're going to do."
"Well, I know one thing we're going to do," said Laura fiercely. "If the Dill Pickles don't let Billie come back to us, or at least tell us where she is, I'm going to set the place on fire, that's all."
"That wouldn't help Billie any," said Rose, as they turned from the room.
Breakfast was gloomier than ever that morning. The girls were heavy-eyed and sullen, and Miss Cora, presiding grimly at the head of the table, looked, as one of the older girls said, "like a death's head at the feast."
"But where was the feast?" another girl retorted.
In fact this meal was scantier than any that had gone before, and if it had not been for the night's raid the girls would have been in a pretty bad way.
Amanda and the "Shadow" were there, and if looks could kill, they would have both died on the spot. But there was no sign of Billie. The girls had hardly thought there would be, but they had hoped.
A little while later there was another mass meeting held in dormitory "C," and it was Rose Belser this time who took the floor.
"We simply can't stand it any longer, girls," she told them, her black eyes snapping. "Wasn't that a wonderful breakfast we had this morning? It makes you sick to think of it. And we don't even know whether Billie got as much as we did. We've got to do something right away. We can try to get word to Miss Walters. I have her address, but I don't know how we're ever going to——"