“Neither do I. Don’t intend to have ’em. I begin to believe you may be right about keeping Bess in her place.” Natalie’s evident earnestness had made some impression on her companion.
“I know I am,” Natalie emphasized with lofty dignity. “Are you sure she doesn’t know anything about that hazing business? She made a remark to Harriet Stephens last spring that sounded as though she knew all about it.”
“Well, she does not, unless someone of the Sans besides you or I has told her of it.” Leslie sat up straight in her chair, looking rather worried. “I must pump her and find out what she knows. If she does know of it, then we have a traitor in the camp. Mark me, I’ll throw any girl out of the club who has babbled that affair. Didn’t we doubly swear, afterward, never to tell it to a soul while we were at Hamilton?”
“Hard to say who told Bess,” shrugged Natalie. “Certainly it was not I.”
“No; you’re excepted. I said that.” Leslie’s assurance was bored. She was tired of hearing Natalie extol her own loyalty. It was an everyday citation. “That hazing stunt of ours doesn’t worry me half so much as that trick we put over on Trotty Remson. I am always afraid that Laura will flivver someday and the whole thing will come to light. If it happens after I leave Hamilton, I don’t care. All I care about is getting through. If I keep on the soft side of my father he is going to let me help run his business. That’s my dream. But I have to be graduated with honors, if there are any I can pull down. At least I must stick it out here for my diploma.”
“What would your father do if you flunked this year in any way?”
“He would disown me. I mean that. I have money of my own; lots of it. That part of it wouldn’t feaze me. But my father is the only person on earth I really have any respect for. I’d never get over it; never.”
Leslie’s loose features showed a tightened intensity utterly foreign to them. Her hands took hold on the chair arms with a grip which revealed something of the nervous emotion the fell contingency inspired in her.
The two girls had arrived on the seven o’clock train from the north that evening. They had stopped at the Lotus for dinner and had reached the hall shortly before the beginning of the serenade. Leslie had been Natalie’s guest at the Weymans’ camp in the Adirondacks. Thus the two had come on to college together instead of accepting Dulcie Vale’s invitation to journey from New York City to Hamilton in the Vales’ private car, as they had done the three previous years. Since the hazing party on St. Valentine’s night, Leslie and Dulcie had not been on specially good terms. Leslie was still peeved with Dulcie for not having locked the back door of the untenanted house as she had been ordered to do. Had she obeyed orders the Sans would not have been put to panic-stricken flight by unknown invaders. While those who had come to Marjorie’s rescue might have hung about the outside of the house, they could not have found entrance easy with both back and front doors properly locked.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me tonight.” Leslie rose and commenced a restless walk up and down the room, hands clasped behind her back. “That music upset me, I guess. I wonder who the singers were. Serenading Bean and her gang. Humph! Nobody ever serenaded us that I can recall. I suppose Beanie arrived in all her glory this afternoon, hence those yowlers under her window tonight.”