They were greeted with open arms on the night of their return. Miss Walters, the much-beloved head of Three Towers Hall, said that she had been just about to send out a searching party for them.
They were late for supper, but that only made their appetites better, and as they were favorites of the cook they were given an extra share of everything and ate ravenously, impatient of the questions flung at them by the curious girls.
“Thank goodness the Dill Pickles aren’t here,” Laura said to Billie between mouthfuls of pork chop. “Think of coming home with our appetites to the kind of dinners they used to serve us.”
“Laura! what a horrible thought,” cried Billie, her eyes dancing as she helped herself to two more biscuits. “That’s treason.”
For the “Dill Pickles” were two elderly spinsters who had been teachers at Three Towers Hall when Billie and her chums had first arrived. Their tartness and strictness and miserliness had made the life of the girls in the school uncomfortable for some time.
And then had come the climax. Miss Walters, having been called away for a week or two, Miss Ada Dill and Miss Cora Dill, disrespectfully dubbed by the girls the twin “Dill Pickles,” had things in their own hands and proceeded to make the life of the girls unbearable. They had taken away their liberty, and then had half starved them by cutting down on the meals until finally the girls had rebelled.
With Billie in the lead, they had marched out of Three Towers Hall one day, bag and baggage, to stay in a hotel in the town of Molata until Miss Walters should get back. Miss Walters, coming home unexpectedly, had met the girls in town, accompanied them back to Three Towers and, as one of the girls slangily described it, “had given the Dill Pickles all that was coming to them.”
In other words, the Misses Dill had been discharged and the girls had come off victorious. Now there were two new teachers in their place who were as different from the Dill Pickles as night is from day. All the girls loved them, especially a Miss Arbuckle who had succeeded Miss Cora Dill in presiding over the dining hall.
So it was to this that Laura had referred when she said, “Thank goodness the Dill Pickles are gone!”
After they had eaten all they could possibly contain, the girls retired to their dormitories, where they changed their clothes, still damp from their adventure, for comfortable, warm night gowns, and held court, all the girls gathering in their dormitory to hear of their adventures, for nearly an hour.