And then the most surprising thing happened. The President rose quickly from her chair, hurried over to where Molly was sitting with bowed head and drew the girl to her as tenderly as Molly's own mother might have done.
"There, there, my darling child," she said soothingly. "I haven't the heart to torture you any longer. I know, of course, that it was your friend, Miss Kean, who was at the bottom of last night's performance, and as usual you came down to help her when she fell. I only wanted you to tell me exactly what you knew."
The truth is, the President had tried an experiment on Molly and the experiment had failed, and no one was more pleased than Miss Walker herself in the failure. She liked to see her girls loyal to each other. But things had not been going well at Wellington that autumn. There was an undercurrent of mischief in the air, a dangerous element, carefully hidden, and still slowly undermining the standards of Wellington. Miss Walker was very much enraged over the rumor that the ghost of her beloved sister had been seen wandering about the campus. This was too much. Her Irish maid had repeated the story to her and she had determined to lay that ghost without the assistance of the night watchman or any one else.
The surprise of first being stretched on the grill and then embraced by the President of Wellington College brought Molly to herself like a shock of cold water. She looked up into the older woman's face and smiled and the two sat down side by side on a little sofa, the President still holding Molly's hand. There might be some who could resist the piteous look in those blue eyes, but not President Walker.
"I'm afraid I'm just a weak old person," she said to herself, giving the hand a little squeeze and then releasing it.
"Judy wasn't the ghost, either, Miss Walker," said Molly, glad to be able to defend her friend on safe grounds. "The night we were chased Judy was in our rooms all the time. Last night was the first time she had ever done anything so foolish. It was only because a girl she goes with bet she wouldn't. It was the same girl that made her dye her hair," Molly added, without any feeling of disloyalty.
"Ahem! And who is this young woman who has such a bad influence on Miss Kean?"
Molly flushed. Was she to be placed on the grill again? But after all there was no harm in telling the name of the girl who had brought all Judy's trouble on her.
"Adele Windsor."
"And what do you know of her?"