"Hold your peace all of you, and get ready for breakfast!" was the polite rejoinder of the teacher. "Delia is in Mrs. Pomeroy's sick in bed. That is the whole story, and no one in their senses would have thought of any thing else. Look at your petticoats, Miss Faushane,—actually sweeping the floor—I wonder you don't take them to rub the stove with. Miss Crosby, I will give you an untidy mark for every curl on your head, if you don't get rid of those curl papers by breakfast time. Miss Graves, if none of the other teachers think it worth while to pay any attention to their duties, I think as long as you are monitress, you might see that the young ladies behave themselves properly, instead of indulging in idle gossiping conjectures about their companion."
Janet only shrugged her shoulders and retreated to her own room, to finish her toilet. She had found that the best way to silence Miss Thomas, was to let her alone. But Belle was not quite so forbearing.
"I wonder who started the idle gossipping conjectures," said she quite loudly enough to be heard by the retreating teacher. "No one would have dreamed of Delia's having run away, if Miss Thomas had not said so."
"It is queer, though," said Almira Crosby. "How did she come to be over there without any one's knowing it?"
"Easy enough," replied Belle. "She rooms alone, and not feeling well, she probably dressed herself, and went over to Mrs. Pomeroy's room for some medicine, and Mrs. Pomeroy kept her."
"She has not seemed like herself for a good while," remarked Annette. "She has grown so nervous. I have noticed how she changes color when she gives in her exercise, and you know we did not used to think she cared for any such thing."
"There is something wrong about those exercises," said Almira. "I have never felt satisfied about that matter."
"Oh, Almira!" exclaimed Janet, who had appeared again upon the scene, when Miss Thomas had departed. "What a vacuum your head must be! If you get a notion into it, it buzzes there like a bee in an empty cask. It seems to me that I would stuff it with something, if it were only to stop the echo. No one but yourself sees anything wonderful in the matter at all, and I had forgotten it long ago."
"Very likely," returned Almira, no-ways abashed by the ridicule, to which indeed she was pretty well accustomed. "But I don't forget a thing when once I hear it."
"Don't you?" said Belle. "In what year was the English revolution? You hear that often enough."