“You needn’t hello us,” snapped back one of the larger girls unexpectedly. “We don’t speak to no robbers.”
“Robbers!” exclaimed Gloria, incredulously.
“Yes, robbers. And stealers too,” dared the girl. The little group had come to a standstill and were glaring at Gloria in loyal support of their leader.
“I don’t know you at all,” declared Gloria with a flash of indignation no less sharp than their own.
“Well, we know you all right. You’re the girl that lives in the fancy house on Maple Street. Well, that house ain’t theirs.” There was a menacing threat in this last sentence. It sounded to Gloria as if someone in the background was waiting to wrest the house from her relatives. She knew it was foolish to attempt any understanding with the irate children, so she threw up her dark head and passed on disdainfully.
“Smarty, ain’t y’u? Well, you jest wait—wait until my father gets after them stuck-up Towers-ers.”
Gloria was no coward but she shut her ear to the tirade. Of all dreadful things she had always considered disgrace the worst. And this looked like a threat of it. Coupled with what she had overheard of trouble within her aunt’s home, there was, to say the least, too much likelihood of truth in some part of the suspicion, for her to disregard it.
“But they would never cheat any one,” she meditated. “Of course, folks are apt to get into money troubles, but that wouldn’t make them robbers.”
The entire morning session was lost to Gloria because of her encounter. Whom would she ask about it? To whom would she go for advice? Trixy had been her friend. She was older, and therefore should be wiser.
Circumstances favored her talk with Trixy. Just as the dismissal gong sounded Trixy called from the corridor. “Take a ride with me, Glo?”