“I suppose so.”
“Now, tell me, Miss Campbell, what is the grudge which this young lady perhaps has against you and your friends?”
“Oh, it’s only a silly schoolgirl affair,” replied Billie. “I am ashamed to tell you, because it seems so utterly trivial in comparison to other things. She was angry because I wouldn’t join her club and because we saw her the night of the fire with her hair up in rubber curlers.”
The detective laughed outright.
“That’s a woman’s reason for taking revenge,” he said.
“And she was angry again because I took her into the wrong room, when the hotel was burning and we had to escape over the roof.”
“Humph!” exclaimed the detective. “Insult piled onto injury, eh? So this Miss Rogers is a very vindictive character?”
Billie hesitated. It went against her straight-forward, honest nature to malign even Belle Rogers.
“She has been spoiled all her life,” she said, “and you know how spoiled children must have their own way. That is all. She was angry because she planned to make me a member of her club and queen it over me as she does over the others, and I disappointed her. Her mother and friends have taken good care always that she should never be disappointed and she just didn’t know what the feeling was, I suppose.”
“She must be quite a remarkably spoiled young woman to go to such lengths for such a trivial offence. But we sometimes get in deeper than we intend, you know.”