“Yes, Nancy Brown,” continued Belle, growing angrier every moment. “You will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to think the matter over well before you decide to join that low, common crowd, for I assure you it will be the last of you with us——”
Billie was so aghast at the insolence of the spoiled girl that she did not attempt to interrupt the rush of words which seemed to flow from her lips without any effort whatever. She was very angry herself, as a matter of fact, but with the self-control she had learned from her father, she determined to hold her peace until Belle had run down, as she expressed it later to the other girls.
At last there came a pause, and Billie, who had been sitting on the window ledge in the gymnasium swinging her feet and thinking of what she was going to say when she was entirely prepared to speak, slipped down to the floor and stood before the enraged girl like a brave soldier in the face of battle.
But this was all she said, for Billie was really very much like a boy.
“I don’t think it is any honor to join your club, or go with you and your friends. I wouldn’t give up Mary and Nancy and Elinor for twenty Mystic Sevens. I’d rather go to boarding school any day, and that’s about the worst fate that could happen to me.”
Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Belle in the grip of a tempest of sobs and tears. Such rages are quite like the West Indian storms which sweep up the coast with a great blowing of wind and then, after a tremendous roar of thunder, the downpour follows.
That night in her pretty chintz-hung bedroom in the beautiful Rogers house, which was one of the show places of West Haven, Belle Rogers planned her revenge. Her temples were throbbing and her whole body ached with exhaustion. Tempers are really quite as devastating to the system as the West Indian tornadoes are to the country over which they sweep.
“I’ll get even with that rough tom-boy,” she said out loud. “I’ll pay her back if it takes all winter to do it. I’ll make her sorry she ever came to West Haven, and I’ll make the others pay, too. They’ll see what it means to interfere with me and my plans. Perhaps papa will give me a motor car, only I’m afraid of the things, and I never could run one. My hands are much too small and delicate to handle machinery.”
“Belle, darling, do you feel any better?” asked Mrs. Rogers, anxiously, outside the door.
Belle made no reply. It was her custom to pretend to be asleep when she wished to be alone, and she wished now to spend a long uninterrupted evening to herself, for her thoughts were very busy. A plan had come into her head. It had sprung up suddenly, full-grown, as if it had been secretly hatching in the bottom of her mind for a long time and now appeared a matured scheme.