“I hadn’t time to think only of the girls—you know them all, Miss Ashton!”
“And who were the boys?” asked Miss Ashton, thinking perhaps she might aid the other troubled principal.
“The boys! oh, the boys!” and Mamie’s face looked truly distressed now. “Please don’t ask me, Miss Ashton. I’d cut my tongue out before I’d tell you!”
“Very well, go on with your ride.”
Then Mamie repeated fully and truly all that a girl in the flush of excitement caused by a stolen sleigh-ride could be expected to remember, not palliating one thing, from the supper to the dance, and the clamber in at midnight through the open window.
If at some points a little laugh gurgled up from her fun-loving soul, as she told her tale, Miss Ashton understood, and forgave it.
“I thank you, Mamie,” said she at last; and she stroked the little hand given to her so loyally for the sacrificial feruling, but she turned her eyes away. 133 What Mamie might have read there, she dared not trust to the girl’s quick sight; indeed, she hardly dared to trust the feeling that prompted it in herself.
There was no use to have another Faculty meeting, and depend upon it for help; she must settle the trouble alone.
It was Susan Downer who was next called to the principal’s room.
She went tremblingly. What was to happen to her now? Miss Ashton knew the girls’ names who went on the sleigh-ride, and as yet no one had been punished. Could it be about “Storied West Rock”? How Susan by this time hated its very name, and how much she would have given if she had never known it, she could best have told.