Mignon straightened up with an angry jerk. “You’ve made me lose my handbag,” she accused furiously. “I let go of it with my suitcase when you came blundering along and crashed against me. You’ve always brought me bad luck, Marjorie Dean. I wish you’d never came to Sanford to live. I’ll miss my train and it will be your fault. Don’t stand there like a dummy. Help me hunt for my bag. I’ve got to make my train. Do you hear me?”
Already Marjorie was bending low, her anxious hands groping about on the sidewalk in search of the lost bag. Mignon, too, was hunting frantically for it, keeping up a continuous fire of half-sarcastic, half-lamenting remark.
“Here it is,” cried Marjorie, as her searching fingers came in contact with the leather of the bag. “I’m glad I found it and I’m sorry I made you drop it.” Privately she was wondering at Mignon’s apparent agitation. It was far more intense than her anger.
Both girls straightening up simultaneously, Marjorie caught full sight of Mignon’s face under the flickering gleam of a neighboring arc light. It was white and set and her black eyes held a hunted, desperate look. Without a word of thanks she snatched the bag from Marjorie’s hand, picked up her suitcase and started on.
Yet in that revealing instant under the arc light a sudden, terrifying apprehension laid hold on Marjorie. Mignon’s pale, tense features, her evident haste, the suitcase, her frenzied determination to make the train, the fact that she was rushing through the rain on foot to the station—all seemed to tally with the dreadful suspicion that gripped Marjorie. Could it be that Mignon was running away from home?
To think was to act with Marjorie. In a flash she was speeding to overtake the fleeing girl, now a few yards ahead of her. Catching up with Mignon, she cried out on impulse, “You mustn’t run away from home, Mignon! Please, please go back with me! When I met you I was on my way to your house to ask your father if you couldn’t stay in Sanford High and graduate with our class.”
“Who told you I was going to run away from home?” flashed Mignon, whirling fiercely upon Marjorie.
“No one told me,” was the steady admission. “It just came to me all of a sudden. If I’m wrong, forgive me. If I’m right, then please don’t do it.” Marjorie’s voice rose beseechingly. “You have everything in the world to make you happy. Your father loves you, even if he is angry with you now. No one else will ever take care of you as he has.”
“My father hates me,” contradicted Mignon savagely. “If he really cared for me he could never send me away to be a prisoner in a convent school. Yes, I am going to leave home, and you nor anyone else shall stop me. Everybody hates me and I hate everybody!” The last word ended in a passionate sob of mingled rage and humiliation. Mignon was now tasting the bitterness of one against whom the world has turned.
“Poor Mignon.” Moved by sincere pity, Marjorie laid a comforting hand on the would-be refugee’s arm.