“Really, Miss Higgins, I must request you not to raise any more false alarms like this. There is your water pitcher.”
She pointed to the chandelier where the pitcher had been hoisted on a piece of cord. A good many other girls had gathered about Minerva’s door, and a ripple of laughter swept along the hall.
“Edith, did you play that joke?” asked Margaret later.
“Judy was a party to it, and Katherine and several others,” answered Edith evasively. “We thought it high time to put an end to burglar alarms. Minerva Higgins has come to be a public nuisance.”
Margaret smiled. Her dignity would never allow her to enter into what she called “rowdy jokes.” However, it did not mar her enjoyment of the story about them afterward.
But it was an angry, sullen Minerva who presented herself at the door of No. 5, Quadrangle, that evening at eight o’clock. She had left off her medals and she had not worn the indigo blue. Judy was relieved at this, but Molly and Nance considered it a bad sign.
The first half-hour of the reparation party dragged slowly.
“We’ve piped for Minerva and she will not dance; we’ve mourned for her and she will not mourn. It’s a hopeless case,” Judy remarked in an aside to Nance.
But Molly had formed a resolution and she was determined to carry it through.
“Behind that Chinese wall of vanity, Minerva has a little soul hidden somewhere and I’m going to reach it to-night if I have to blast with dynamite,” she thought.