The still, small voice made itself heard so plainly that she could not refuse to listen at first, but she tried to hush it, and at last succeeded.
"I'm not going to do any harm," she said; "only just to look at the locket, and that can't hurt it. Belle won't know it, and she won't be mad."
She opened Belle's desk and peeped in.
There lay the pretty trifle she coveted in the snug corner where the little owner's hands had so carefully placed it. Mabel looked and looked, and from looking she went to touching it. First with only one finger, feeling guilty and ashamed all the time; for with all her faults Mabel was not generally deceitful or meddling. Presently growing bolder, she took it up, shut down the lid of the desk, and sat turning the locket over and over, wishing that the jeweller were there, so that she might show it to him while Belle knew nothing about it.
Suddenly she heard a quick, running step in the hall without; and before she had time to open Belle's desk and put the locket in its place, Dora Johnson came in. Mabel dropped the locket in her lap, and threw her pocket-handkerchief over it. Dora saw nothing wrong, only Mabel sitting there with a very red face, which she supposed to arise from shame, as indeed it partly did, though it came from a cause which Dora never suspected.
"It's beginning to rain, and we all have to come in," said Dora; and the next moment the whole troop of children running in proved the truth of her words. They did not all come into the school-room; but Dora and one or two more were there, so that Mabel did not dare to lift the lid of Belle's desk again and put back the locket.
She was very much frightened, and would have been content, glad indeed, to give up the hope of any locket at all, to have had Belle's safely back where she had left it. She knew that her school-mates would all cry out shame upon her if they saw that she had meddled with the locket, and she knew that she deserved this; but she shrank from the looks and words of scorn and displeasure which she knew would fall upon her when they discovered the treachery she had been guilty of towards her dear little cousin.
So she felt and thought as she sat there with the locket hidden on her lap, and at last feeling that she must rid herself of it by some means, and fearing that Miss Ashton would return to call them to order before she did so, she rose and wandered out of the room, holding the locket fast within her handkerchief.
Most of the children were in the hall, and she went on into the cloak-room. There was no one there; and as she looked about her, wondering what she should do with the locket, the bell rang to call the class back to their places.
With no time to think, with no plan in her head, not meaning to keep the locket from Belle, nor yet seeing her way clearly to the means of getting it back, Mabel hastily dropped it in a corner upon the floor, snatched down her own hat and sacque and threw them over it; then ran back to the school-room with beating heart and crimson cheeks. No one noticed her guilty looks; or, if they did, laid them to the same cause that Dora Johnson had done, and did not speak of them.