"What is the highest mountain, Cecilia?" he repeated sternly.
Sissy stood a moment looking at him. All that she might not say—her contempt for pledge-breakers, her shocked hero-worship now forever a thing of the past, her outraged school-girl's affection—she shot straight at the master from her angry eyes.
Then she sat down.
"I don't know," she said.
He looked up from his book, incredulous. Ten credits out of one hundred gone at one fell swoop—ten of Sissy Madigan's credits, for which she fought so gallantly and which she cherished so jealously when she once had them in her possession.
"I—don't—know," repeated Sissy, disdainfully.
The master passed the question. But as he put it to the next girl, Sissy put another question, with her eyes, to the same girl.
"Are you a scab?" her steady gaze challenged. "Are you going to benefit by what a mate suffers for principle's sake? Are you a coward who doesn't dare to stand up for your class? And—do you know what you'll get from me if you are?"
"I—don't—know," faltered the girl.
A glory of triumph shot over Sissy's face. It leaped like a sunrise from peak to peak in a mountain-range of obstinacy. "I don't know"—"I don't know"—"I don't know"—the shibboleth of the strikers' cause went down the line. The master was shamed in public by the banner pupils of his school. He writhed, but he put the question steadily to every girl till he came to Irene, last in the line.