"There oughtn't to be any for you," said Margaret Howes, impulsively laying her hand on Elinor's. "There isn't anything coming to you but plain every-day satisfaction in getting your rights."
"Ah, but how about Doris?" questioned Elinor sadly. "Isn't she to be remembered?"
"Why should she be?" returned the other warmly. "Did she have any thought for anything but her own parade when she pretended to be sorry for you? There's such a thing as carrying virtue too far, my dear girl, and I think you're straining your charity with too fine a sieve."
Elinor smiled a wistful little puckered smile. "Perhaps I am rather lop-sided in my feelings," she confessed. "I always feel so dreadfully sorry for the wrong-doers, and the less they care the sorrier I am."
Patricia had opened her lips to sustain Margaret Howes' point of view, when Griffin, followed by Miss Green, came breathlessly in to the room.
"Now we're all ready," she said eagerly when they had made room for the generous figure of the monitor. "Fire away with your tale, young one, and don't spare the details. We're game for any length of story, so long as you can prove it."
Judith, with her cheeks flushing and paling and her composed tones carrying conviction, laid the story of her discoveries before them, telling them how she had thought of it first "for fun, like a plot for a story," and then how she had remembered that Doris Leighton had Elinor's keys with access to the locker where the two studies for the prize designs were left that night that Elinor was taken ill; how she had discovered through Doris' younger sister that Doris had made her study for the Roberts prize from a little rough color sketch "just like Elinor had."
"I'd heard her say the Saturday that Miss Jinny came to see us that she never made sketches beforehand," said Judith, earnestly. "And she told Patricia the very day Elinor fainted that she hadn't begun her study. So I pretended to myself that we were all in a story, and I thought and thought what I should make of it if I were reading about it all instead of living in it. Then I saw that the thing to do was to find out if Doris Leighton had the little color sketch that she used for her study, and compare it with Elinor's."
Here Elinor gave a start, and then composed herself as Judith went on.
"I hunted and hunted for Elinor's, which I knew very well, for it was made on the back of one of my old tablets, but I couldn't find it. Geraldine couldn't find the one Doris used either, and then I got awfully interested. I told Geraldine that I was making up a story and I wanted to act it all out in life, and she was glad to help. She was mad at Doris anyway, and so she hunted everywhere for her sketch, but she couldn't find it. I was pretty near giving up then, for I thought I was mistaken; but the men were just making ready to take out Leighton's ashes when I thought, like a flash, 'There's where it would be, if anywhere,' and I told Geraldine. So we got sticks and we rummaged. My gracious, but it was dusty!"