Exactly what the complaint was no one knew except those who had made it. It was kept a careful secret. But in school rumors arise in the most subtle way. They are whispered about behind doors at recess; written on the margins of text books in class and hastily rubbed out; vaguely hinted at here and there until they spread from room to room and class to class and gradually the whole school is bursting with the news. And the poor victim may all this time be entirely unconscious that she is the very centre of a seething, boiling pot of gossip.
This is how the present rumor started in West Haven High School:
One afternoon when the last gong had sounded the sophomore class gathered in the locker room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers were only so in name. There had never been any keys to them, because there had never been any need to keep belongings under lock and key in West Haven High School, where most of the pupils had known each other all their lives.
On this particular afternoon, every incident of which our four friends will remember as long as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass, as usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent over an automobile map, were making plans for a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her Latin for the next day. It was that lingering, lazy time after school is over, which all school girls know.
Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung open the door of her locker, next to that of Belle Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in looking at herself in her own private mirror, hung on the inside of her locker door.
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” exclaimed Fannie Alta, with a very excited and strange manner. “I have lost something. Something which my mamma gave me to keep for her. What shall I do? What shall I do?”
“Why, what was it, Fannie?” asked the other girls, gathering around her sympathetically. “Let us help you find it.”
“Oh, oh, it is terrible!” cried the young Spanish girl, wringing her hands and weeping in her handkerchief alternately. “What shall I do? What shall I do?”
“Was it money you lost?” asked Billie, in her usual rather abrupt manner.