"I will investigate this," she said. "And I want you, Doris, to go with me and show me what damage has been done. I have just one thing to say."
She paused and her large dark eyes swept the uplifted faces of the girls.
"This looks like the work of thieves. Since our head janitor, Mr. Forbes, has not yet arrived, robbers would have found it comparatively easy to break into the gym and the boathouse last night.
"I shall set an investigation afoot at once and if we find that this is an actual robbery we will do our utmost to apprehend and punish the thieves."
Again she paused and swept the girls with her slow, keen gaze.
"It has been our misfortune once or twice in the past," she said, speaking clearly, "to have harbored within the walls of Laurel Hall that worst of public nuisances, the practical joker. If I find," each word came clear and distinct like the tinkling of icicles upon stone, "that any one of my girls has been so unworthy as to play a trick of this sort, I warn her now that she may expect scant mercy from me. There is one thing that Laurel Hall cannot and will not tolerate—and that is the perpetrator of practical jokes."
She held them with the severity of her gaze for a moment longer; then motioned to Doris and went with her toward the gymnasium.
The tension relaxed, and as soon as Miss Jane had disappeared, the girls broke up into chattering, excited, gesticulating groups.
Jessie Robinson was the center of one of these and seemed temporarily to have forgotten her new friends.
Feeling a bit out of things, the three chums decided to run up to their room—the room coveted by Kate Speed—to talk things over.