Little dreaming of the tempest they were stirring up, the girls thoughtlessly planned their little joke. Their shouts of laughter would have been turned into tears of pity could they have beheld the harvest of woe that was to spring from it.
Nannie Rogers noticed that the beautiful new-comer was assigned to an instrument at a table almost directly opposite the private office. This inflamed the jealously of Nannie Rogers.
She noted how he watched her from the window of his office all the next day.
More than one girl called Nannie Rogers' attention to this at noon-hour.
"You will have to look to your laurels, Nan," more than one declared, banteringly. "You will find this Ida May a rival, I fear."
"Any girl had better be dead than attempt to be a rival of mine," she answered.
There came a time when the girls remembered that remark all too forcibly.
Ida May bent over her task, paying little attention to anything around her. She was trying to forget her double sorrow, all that she had gone through, and the death of her poor mother that had followed.