“Insufferable girl!” said Dora Russell; “I wonder you try to draw her out, Cecil. You know perfectly that we none of us care to have anything to do with her.”
“I know perfectly that you are all doing your best to make her life miserable,” said Cecil, suddenly and boldly. “No one in this school has obeyed Mrs Willis’s command to treat Annie as innocent—you are practically sending her to Coventry, and I think it is unjust and unfair. You don’t know, girls, that you are ruining poor Annie’s happiness.”
“Oh, dear! she doesn’t seem at all dull,” said Miss West, a second-class girl. “I do think she’s a hardened little wretch.”
“Little you know about her,” said Cecil, the colour fading out of her pale face. Then, after a pause, she added, “The injustice of the whole thing is that in this treatment of Annie you break the spirit of Mrs Willis’s command—you, none of you, certainly tell her that she is guilty, but you treat her as such.”
Here Hester Thornton said a daring thing.
“I don’t believe Mrs Willis in her heart of hearts considers Annie guiltless.”
These words of Hester’s were laughed at by most of the girls, but Dora Russell gave her an approving nod, and Cecil, looking paler than ever, dropped suddenly into her seat, and no longer tried to defend her absent friend.
“At any rate,” said Miss Conway, who as the head girl of the whole school was always listened to with great respect. “It is unfortunate for the success of our entertainment that there should be all this discussion and bad feeling with regard to Miss Forest. For my own part, I cannot make out why the poor little creature should be hunted down, or what affair it is of ours whether she is innocent or not. If Mr Everard and Mrs Willis says she is innocent, is not that enough? The fact of her guilt or innocence can’t hurt us one way or another. It is a great pity, however, for our own sakes, that we should be out with her now, for, whatever her faults, she is the only one of us who is ever gifted with an original thought. But, as we can’t have her, let us set to work without her—we really can’t waste the whole evening over this sort of talk.”
Discussions as to the coming pleasure were now again resumed with vigour, and after a great deal of animated arguing it was resolved that two short plays should be acted; that a committee should be immediately formed, who should select the plays, and apportion their various parts to the different actors.
The committee selected included Miss Russell, Miss Conway, Hester Thornton, Cecil Temple, and two other girls of the second-class. The conference then broke up, but there was a certain sense of flatness over everything, and Cecil was not the only girl who sighed for the merry meetings of last year—when Annie had been the life and soul of all the proceedings, and when one brilliant idea after another with regard to the costumes for the fancy ball had dropped from her merry tongue.