Miss Lochinvar: A Story for Girls

by Marion Ames Taggart

Three of the teachers were standing in the hall at noon as Jan came down it. She had no thought of approaching unseen or unheard, but it happened that the day was dark and the hall badly lighted at that point, and Jan had on her rubbers, deadening her footfall.

She heard the name “Gladys Graham,” and stopped short. There was no time in which to debate her action. She despised listening, but she wanted—no, that did not express it—she felt that she must hear what was being said. Before she had more than grasped the temptation before her, and had not had time to yield to it or resist it, she heard in the brief pause she made at the turn of the hall words which gave her quick wits the clue for which she longed. The English teacher’s voice, clear and resonant, reached her. She was saying: “There can not be the least possible doubt of the child’s guilt. It was an abominable letter, begging Daisy to join her in a plot to bring discredit on the entire class and school, written in Gladys’s hand, on that very peculiar foreign paper she has, and which there is none like in the school, if there is in the city. And Daisy, whom you never liked, Miss Esterbrook, had written across the bottom of the page: ‘I would not do such a thing for the world.’ The paper fell into Miss Larned’s hands accidentally—it had got in with some composition papers I had to correct. Gladys deserves much more severe treatment than being deprived of her part in the play, but policy, as well as kindness, makes Miss Larned hush the matter up. It is very fine of Daisy Hammond, and shows that she really loves Gladys, that she does not tell the other girls, for of course she must guess what is wrong.”

“I could not have believed such a thing like that of Gladys,” said the German teacher. “She is wain and not so much a student as her sister, but I have never a bad child found her.”

Jan turned back and went quietly up the hall in the direction whence she had come. No one had seen or heard her, and she wanted to make certain that she was able to speak naturally before she encountered the group of teachers.

So this was the trouble! Daisy Hammond had evidently written a letter, purporting to come from Gladys, containing a proposal to do something wrong, a proposal which she—writing then in her own person—had indignantly refused. Daisy then had contrived that the letter should fall into the teachers’ hands, knowing or hoping that the result of her plot would be to give her Gladys’s coveted part in the play. Jan’s hands clinched as she realized what a contemptible trick had been played, and she resolved to expose it if it took the rest of her life to do so—Jan was inclined to be dramatic under strong excitement.

And the idea, she thought contemptuously, of Miss Arnold saying that the paper was written in Gladys’s hand, when all the first class and second class wrote so nearly alike, that, with the exception of Gwen, to whom much writing had given an individual hand, one could never be certain whose writing one was reading. But the peculiar paper? This was a difficulty, and Jan longed to get Gwen to herself safe at home and begin investigations with her help. But Gwen was out when Jan reached the house, and on second thought it struck “Miss Lochinvar” that it would be delightful if she could ferret out Gladys’s wrongs alone. What happiness it would be to know that she—the unwelcome cousin, of whom Gladys had always been ashamed—should be able to set her right in the eyes of the school where her present disgrace far exceeded that of having a cousin who did not mind confessing to poverty!

As a preliminary step, this dawning Sherlock Holmes went to work on paper dolls’ dresses for Viva, little as they seemed to bear on the case. She was anxious not to arouse Gladys’s suspicion, and she wanted an excuse for obtaining some of “that very peculiar foreign paper” of which Miss Arnold had spoken as belonging to Gladys.

“Have you any sort of odd letter-paper, Gladys, that you would let me have to make a doll’s dress?” asked artful Jan. “I want something stiffer than the paper we have, and something out of the common.”

Gladys received the request graciously. She had been pleasanter to Jan since she had stood by her in the matter of the play and had refused to take Gwen’s part when it was offered her—a fact that Gwen was careful that her sister should know, not failing to point out the contrast of this loyalty to her own treatment of Jan.

“I had the very thing,” said Gladys, “but there isn’t a scrap left. Wait—I’ll look—maybe there is just a scrap.” She tossed over the papers in her desk and produced a half sheet of a peculiar greenish-gray paper with a tulip design in one corner. “Would this be any good?” she asked. “I had lots of it, but I gave half to Daisy, and mine is all used up. It came from Holland, and now I’m sorry I didn’t keep all of it, for nobody has any like it.”