At Lavender House the confusion, the terror, and the dismay were great. For several hours the girls seemed quite to lose their heads, and just when, under Mrs Willis’s and the other teachers’ calmness and determination, they were being restored to discipline and order, the excitement and alarm broke out afresh when some one brought Annie’s little note to Mrs Willis, and the school discovered that she also was missing.
On this occasion no one did doubt her motives; disobedient as her act was, no one wasted words of blame on her. All, from the head-mistress to the smallest child in the school, knew that it was love for little Nan that had taken Annie off; and the tears started to Mrs Willis’s eyes when she first read the tiny note, and then placed it tenderly in, her desk. Hester’s face became almost ashen in its hue when she heard what Annie had done.
“Annie has gone herself to bring back Nan to you, Hester,” said Phyllis. “It was I told her, and I know now by her face that she must have made up her mind at once.”
“Very disobedient of her to go,” said Dora Russell; but no one took up Dora’s tone, and Mary Price said, after a pause—
“Disobedient or not, it was brave—it was really very plucky.”
“It is my opinion,” said Nora, “that if anyone in the world can find little Nan it will be Annie. You remember. Phyllis, how often she has talked to us about gipsies, and what a lot she knows about them?”
“Oh, yes; she’ll be better than fifty policemen,” echoed several girls; and then two or three young faces were turned toward Hester, and some voice said almost scornfully—“You’ll have to love Annie now; you’ll have to admit that there is something good in our Annie when she brings your little Nan home again.”
Hester’s lips quivered; she tried to speak, but a sudden burst of tears came from her instead. She walked slowly out of the astonished little group, who none of them believed that proud Hester Thornton could weep.
The wretched girl rushed up to her room, where she threw herself on her bed and gave way to some of the bitterest tears she had ever shed. All her indifference to Annie, all her real unkindness, all her ever-increasing dislike came back now to torture and harass her. She began to believe with the girls that Annie would be successful; she began dimly to acknowledge in her heart the strange power which this child possessed; she guessed that Annie would heap coals of fire on her head by bringing back her little sister. She hoped, she longed, she could almost have found it in her heart to pray that some one else, not Annie, might save little Nan.
For not yet had Hester made up her mind to confess the truth about Annie Forest. To confess the truth now meant humiliation in the eyes of the whole school. Even for Nan’s sake she could not, she would not, be great enough for this.