"I just wanted to hug you!" she told her afterwards.
"Miss Wild is no doubt properly grateful; all the same you have no right to shield the guilty ones, and I shall hold you to your duty," inflexibly responded Prof. Seabrook.
Katherine saw that he was determined to make her name the culprits, and, for a moment, she was deeply distressed. Then her face suddenly cleared.
"May I suggest that it is the duty of the offenders to confess their own wrongdoing?" she questioned, in a respectful tone; adding: "It certainly is their right to have the opportunity given them, and I would prefer not to rob them of it; while it would release me from a very awkward position if they would do so."
"I think Miss Minturn is right, Prof. Seabrook," Miss Williams here remarked. "I am sure we can all understand how she feels about it, and we know that it would place her under the ban of the whole school if she were to expose the ringleaders without giving them the opportunity, as she says, to volunteer a confession."
Katherine shot a look of gratitude at the speaker, who nodded her sympathy in return.
An uncomfortable silence followed, during which the much-tried girl felt that her principal regarded her as obstinate as well as sentimental, and was more than half inclined not to yield his point, in spite of Miss Williams' espousal of her cause.
"Very well; let it rest here for the present," he at length curtly observed. "You are temporarily excused, Miss Minturn. But if the offenders do not promptly come forward, I shall expect you to tell all you know, later."
Katherine bowed and slipped quietly from the room, but with a choking sensation in her throat, a feeling of injustice pressing heavily upon her heart.
She paused in the hall a moment, after closing the door, trying to calm her perturbed thoughts, when these words from her dear "little book" came to her: