“I suppose you are.”
“Then I stick to it,” said Tavia, with a toss of her head. “Olaine was startled because you were making inquiries about Tom Moran. Haven’t I been watching her—‘hout of me heagle heye,’ as the Cockney villain says in the play——”
“You and your plays!” sniffed Dorothy. “Your romantic nature is working overtime again. I do wish you would make it behave.”
But Tavia secretly held to her own belief. She, and not Dorothy, had observed Miss Olaine’s emotion when she came across the postal card in the mail. Pooh! merely the remainder of that Rector Street School fire would not make the teacher look like that. You couldn’t fool Tavia—at least, so she said in her heart.
She secured the copy of the Salvation Army paper when Dorothy was not near, and carried it into the recitation room in her blouse. Miss Olaine was more than usually severe that morning, and perhaps Tavia was thus encouraged to “spring” her little surprise, as she called it.
She made an excuse to go to the teacher’s desk. She was not the only one who went there while Miss Olaine was at the blackboard, so the plotter did not think she would be suspected more than any of several other members of the class.
She laid the paper, with the page uppermost on which was printed the paragraph asking for news of Tom Moran, among the teacher’s books. And surely Miss Olaine could not miss noticing that paragraph with the broad, blue pencil marks about it!
Tavia could not attend to the problem under discussion, her mind being centered upon what was going to happen when Miss Olaine got back to her desk. Therefore when the teacher shot a query at Tavia suddenly she made a woeful exhibition of herself.
“Inattention, Miss Travers. I will speak to you of that later,” snapped Miss Olaine, striding back to her desk.
“Now she’ll see it!” whispered Tavia to herself, scarcely minding the threatened black mark.