Both girls sat there thinking. Each turned her head, this way and that, cocking ears up as if some myth in the air might explain the mystery, the necklace was passed back and forth automatically, but neither offered to try it on. It was about big enough to slip over the head, and the more they scrutinized it the better they liked it.
“It’s so odd,” conceded Gloria.
“Not as odd as its circumstances,” said Trixy. “Why in the world would a girl want to be so mysterious? Seems to me sort of sensational.”
“And so wounds your social soul,” teased Gloria. “Never mind, dearie, when I drag in the Pirate’s Daughter from her den, it may be in the attic here, you know, and when I tame her so that she’ll eat out of my hands, I fix it up to include you in our trip to her father’s cave. He must be richer than old Captain Kidd to raise such a crop of gems or illuminated spangles, as I glimpsed in that trunk. Now, why couldn’t In Cog have sent me a little jewelled apron or a bedizened girdle to wear to the dingus? You know we are invited?”
“Yes.” The “dingus” or regular social affair exclusively for the pupils of Altmount, did not, at the moment, offer distraction.
“It seems to me we ought to detect a queer girl, easily. She is queer, of course, or she couldn’t think this way. She had to follow her own line of reasoning, and you’ve got to admit that’s queer,” said Trixy, philosophically. “Therefore she must be queer. Now, who is the queerest?”
“Impossible to select,” joked Gloria, “they’re all so queer. Pat’s funny, Jack’s funny, Jean’s snippy, little Helen is just the kind of girl to get an awful crush on one. She goes about with her eyes and mouth at half mast, ready to weep or laugh at the crack of a whip; but even at that she’d never have sense enough to plan all this. Well, Ixy-love, you may wear my jools whenever thou wisheth, and be sure to note the effect. They may give you chills or you might get a fever, or even that black, squarish little stone may exert a beneficent influence on the snippy Jean and make her perlite, for once in her sour life,” Gloria’s manner is not transferable to words but it was flippantly funny. “Perhaps we better start a new diary, the diary of the hoodooed necklace,” she suggested, and would have turned a somersault right then and there, had not Trixy grabbed her left leg ‘on the wing.’
“And I guess we may as well crawl out and get into a shower,” she continued, “before the infants rub their sleepy little eyes into the early sunlight. Though it looks like rain. I couldn’t say anything pretty without sunlight. There’s the seven-thirty bell. Would you ever believe it was more than five A. M.?”
The necklace lay on the pink coverlet while the two girls locked arms and swung back and forth like a pair of solemn Arabs. Anent nothing, they embraced always in that fashion, and the signal to halt was usually the realization of urgent duty. It was now time to dress.
“Scrum-bunctuous, anyhow,” decided Gloria. “Just think of all that’s happened a-ready. I cracked open a trunk, had a precious stone hid under my rug for nearly a month, returned it by way of a moldy old vase, got a note from an In Cog and was the recipient of a coal miner’s souvenir, the last strike settlement maybe; all this and nothing more at Altmount, quoth the raven. Never-more! There! When it’s first worn by either of us I fully expect a sensation.”