DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

INTO THE RIVER THEY PLUNGED.
Dorothy Dale’s Promise. Page [179].

DOROTHY DALE’S
PROMISE

BY
MARGARET PENROSE

AUTHOR OF “DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY,” “DOROTHY
DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL,” “THE MOTOR
GIRLS SERIES,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

BOOKS BY MARGARET PENROSE

THE DOROTHY DALE SERIES

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

• DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY
• DOROTHY DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL
• DOROTHY DALE’S GREAT SECRET
• DOROTHY DALE AND HER CHUMS
• DOROTHY DALE’S QUEER HOLIDAYS
• DOROTHY DALE’S CAMPING DAYS
• DOROTHY DALE’S SCHOOL RIVALS
• DOROTHY DALE IN THE CITY
• DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

• THE MOTOR GIRLS
• THE MOTOR GIRLS ON A TOUR
• THE MOTOR GIRLS AT LOOKOUT BEACH
• THE MOTOR GIRLS THROUGH NEW ENGLAND
• THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CEDAR LAKE
• THE MOTOR GIRLS ON THE COAST
• THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CRYSTAL BAY

Cupples & Leon Co., Publishers, New York

Copyright, 1914, BY
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

CONTENTS

DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

CHAPTER I
“THE BAD PENNIES”

The train started a second after the two almost breathless girls entered the half-empty chair car. They came in with a rush, and barely found their seats and got settled in them before the easily rolling train had pulled clear of the station and the yards.

“Back to dear old Glenwood School, Doro!” cried Tavia Travers, fairly hugging her more sober companion. “How do you feel about it?”

“De-lighted, Miss,” laughed Dorothy Dale. “After our trying experiences in New York——Well! a country life is strenuous enough for me, I guess.”

“But we did have some fun, Doro. And how we got the best of that hateful Akerson man! I just hate that fellow. I could beat him!”

“Your feeling is not scriptural,” groaned Dorothy, though her eyes twinkled. “Don’t you know, if you are struck on one cheek you should turn the other also?”

“But suppose you’re hit on the nose?” demanded Tavia. “One hasn’t two noses!”

“Well, Aunt Winnie is well rid of that Akerson,” said Dorothy, with a little sigh of satisfaction.

“And your cousins, Ned and Nat, have you to thank for the salvation of their income,” returned Tavia.

“Us, you mean,” laughed Dorothy. “You had more to do with the showing up of that real estate agent than I had, Tavia.”

“Nonsense—— Oh, here’s the station where the girls may join us. Do let me open that window, Doro! I don’t care if it is cold outside. I want to see if they are on the platform.”

Tavia was already struggling with the window. But windows in cars are made to stick, it would seem. Tavia cast a pleading glance from her big eyes at the trim young brakeman just then coming through the car.

“Please!” Tavia’s eyes said just as plainly as though she had spoken the word; but the young brakeman shook his head gravely.

“Do you really want it open, Miss?” he asked, hesitating at the chairs occupied by the two friends.

“I want to see out—just a little bit,” said Tavia, pouting.

“But if anybody objects——” the young brakeman continued, taking hold of the fixtures of the sash with his gloved hands.

“Isn’t he just a dear?” murmured Tavia to Dorothy, but loud enough for the young railroad man to hear.

“Do hush, Tavia!” gasped her friend.

The young man opened the window. The exertion seemed to have been considerable, for he grew red to the very tips of his ears while he was raising the sash!

“Oh, thank you—so much!” gushed Tavia, perfectly cool. And when the brakeman had gone, she turned to Dorothy, and demanded:

“Didn’t I say that prettily? Just like a New York society girl would say it—the one who took us to tea that time in the tea room that used to be a millionaire’s stable; do you remember?”

“You are just dreadful, Tavia!” groaned Dorothy Dale. “Will you never learn to behave?”

“There they are!” shrieked Tavia, with her head out of the window. “There are all the ‘bad pennies’—they always turn up again, you know.”

The train was slowing down and the long platform of the junction came into view.

“Who’s there?” begged Dorothy, willing to learn the details from her more venturesome companion.

“Ned Ebony—yes, ma’am! And there’s Cologne. Oh, bully! everybody’s here. This way, girls!” cried Tavia as the car passed a group of merry-faced girls of about their own age. “I hope you’ve all got chairs in this car.”

And, by good fortune, they had! Within the next few moments nearly a dozen of the pupils of Glenwood School had joined the chums—and all of these newcomers, as well as Dorothy and Tavia, belonged to the class that would graduate from the famous old school the coming June.

“Tell us all about New York—do!” cried Ned Ebony, otherwise Edna Black.

“And Miss Mingle!” urged Rose-Mary, whom the other girls called “Cologne” most of the time. “Is she coming back to Glenwood School to teach music?”

“Poor little Mingle has had a hard time,” Dorothy said. “But she is coming back to us—and we must treat her nicely, girls.”

“Oh, we must!” added Tavia. “Better than I treated her feather-bed.”

The girls all laughed at that, for it had been Tavia’s last prank at Glenwood to shower little Miss Mingle with the feathers from her own special tick.

“But about New York,” urged one of the other girls who had never been to the metropolis. “We’re just dying to know something about it, Doro.”

“And if it is as wicked as they say it is,” cried another.

“And as nice,” urged Ned Ebony.

“And as horribly dirty as they say,” went on Cologne.

“And the subways—and elevated trains—and all the rest of it,” came the seemingly unending demands.

“Help! help! ‘Ath-thith-tanth, pleath!’” cried Tavia. “That’s the way one of the girls in a big store called the floorwalker—jutht like that!”

“Now, go ahead and tell us something wonderful,” begged Cologne.

“See here,” said Dorothy, laughing, and diving into her handbag. “Here’s something that I cut out of the paper. It is how New York struck the wondering eye of an Arab who visited it recently. He sent this letter to his brother at home:

“‘People in America travel like rats under the ground, and like squirrels in the air, and the buildings are so high that people have to be put in square boxes and pulled to the top by heavy ropes. In the day the sun furnishes the light as in Morocco. At night the light is as strong as in the day, but people here do not seem to have much use for sleep, as the streets are just as crowded at night as in the day.’

“There!” laughed Dorothy. “That is New York—that, and operas, and theatres, and ‘tea-fights,’ and automobiles whizzing, and car gongs banging, and the rattle of steam riveters, and newsboys shrieking, and——”

“My turn! I’ll relieve you,” interposed Tavia. “There are lots of nice boys—real dressy boys—and it’s fun to go to the tea-rooms, for you see everybody—and they dance! And we’ve learned to dance the very newest dances——”

“Oh, Tavia!” gasped Dorothy. “Only with each other—you know that. We’ve just picked up some of the steps, seeing others do it—and practised in our room at Aunt Winnie’s.”

“There! She always spoils everything,” declared Tavia. “I was just making Ned Ebony’s eyes ‘bulge right out’ at our wickedness. I think——”

At that moment brakes were put on the train and the girls were suddenly tumbled together in quite a heap. There was something ahead to cause this sudden stoppage, and Tavia struggled with her window again. It went up easier this time. Perhaps that was because there was no good looking young man—in or out of uniform—near at hand.

“Oh! it’s a fire!” gasped Cologne, looking over Tavia’s shoulder when the latter got the window open.

“On the tracks!” declared Tavia.

Dorothy got a glimpse of the fire now.

“It’s the bridge over Caloom Creek,” she cried. “It’s all ablaze! I declare, girls, suppose we are held here all night!”

“Don’t mention such a thing!” groaned Ned Ebony. “It’s only twenty miles from here to Glenwood.”

“Right,” agreed Tavia; “and Belding is the next station beyond the creek.”

“Let’s go out and ask the railroad men if we can’t get over the river and get a train on to Glenwood at once,” suggested Dorothy Dale.

“Let’s!” agreed Tavia, with a giggle. “That nice young brakeman, Doro—I’ll ask him, if you are bashful.”

But it was the conductor in charge of the train they found when the hilarious party of school girls got out with their hand baggage.

“How are you going to get across the river, young ladies?” he wanted to know. “The highway bridge is a mile through the woods.”

“But we know all about this river,” spoke up Tavia. “There are stepping stones across it right below this old railroad bridge. We’ve been across them before—haven’t we, Doro?”

“In the summer,” her friend admitted.

“Well, you can try it,” said the conductor. “That bridge is going to be unstable, even if they get the fire out. A train may not cross from either side before to-morrow.”

“Oh!” cried Ned Ebony, “we could never wait that long!”

“Come on!” commanded Tavia, leading the way into a path beside the railroad tracks. “Let’s at least see if the stones are uncovered.”

“You’ll probably find transportation from Belding to the Glen,” said the conductor, as the girls started on.

“Come on, now,” said Tavia. “Let’s show our pluck. Who’s afraid of a little water?”

“I’m always seasick on the water,” murmured Cologne.

“Never heard of anybody being troubled by mal de mer going over stepping stones,” snorted Tavia, in disgust. “Come on!”

There was a fringe of bushes along both sides of the creek. This path beside the railroad tracks forked, and one branch of it led right down to the stepping stones. The water was rough; but there was no ice, and the top of each stone was bare and dry.

Years and years before the people living in the neighborhood had put these flat-top boulders into the creek-bed, because the light wooden bridges were forever being carried away by the floods. Of course that was before the day of the railroad.

Tavia started across the stones, and Dorothy followed her. One after the other they got over safely. But Ned Ebony’s shoe came untied and she was last.

Perhaps she was careless; perhaps she tripped on her shoelace; perhaps she was heedless enough to step on the edge of a certain small boulder that Tavia warned her was not exactly steady.

However it was, the boulder rolled, poor Edna “sprawled” in the air for a moment to get her balance, and then the rock turned over and she went “splash!” into the water.

CHAPTER II
CELIA MORAN, OF THE “FINDLING”

“To the rescue!” shrieked Tavia, charging back to the stepping stones. “Forward, my bold hearties! Man overboard! Who’s got a rope?”

Then she lost the power of speech in a burst of laughter; for certain it was, poor Ned Ebony was an awfully funny sight!

But Dorothy was at hand to do something practical. She sprang back upon the nearest boulder to the one that had turned under her unfortunate schoolmate, and in half a minute she had dragged Edna out of the cold water.

“Oh! oh! OH!” sputtered Edna in crescendo. “I—I’m drowned—dead! Oh, do help me out! You mean thing, Tavia! Oh, I’m frozen!”

The water was ice cold, and the temperature of the air was close to the freezing point. This adventure might easily become serious, and Dorothy knew it.

“We must hurry her to the Belding station,” she cried. “Come on, Neddie! You must run.”

“Run? I can’t. See how water-soaked my skirt is. I can’t run.”

“You must!” declared Dorothy. “Come, Tavia—take her other hand. Have you her bag, Cologne? We’ll run ahead with her and see if we can find somebody to take her in. She must be dried and have other clothing. Oh, hurry!”

“I can’t run, Doro Dale! I tell you I can’t,” wailed the saturated girl.

But they made her hurry, and in fifteen minutes had her in the sitting room belonging to the station agent’s wife, where she was helped to disrobe, dried, dosed with hot tea, and finally managed to dress herself in dry garments borrowed from the bags of her schoolmates, the contents of her own bag being wet, too.

There was no chance to get on to Glenwood for two hours; so the party of schoolgirls must of necessity occupy themselves as best they might around the Belding station. Meanwhile a better introduction to Dorothy Dale and her friends, as well as a brief sketch of “what has gone before” in this series, may not come amiss.

In “Dorothy Dale: A Girl of To-day” my heroine was some three years younger than she is when she makes her bow in this present volume. But even then she was a bright, sprightly girl, more thoughtful than the average of her age, perhaps; yet thoroughly a girl. Nevertheless, because of the illness of her father, Major Dale, of Dalton (she was motherless) Dorothy took up the work of publishing his weekly paper, The Dalton Bugle.

At that time the paper was all the Dales had to depend on for a livelihood; therefore Dorothy’s success as a publisher and editor meant much to herself and her immediate family which, beside the Major, consisted of her two much younger brothers, Joe and Roger. With her closest chum, Octavia Travers, Dorothy had many adventures while running the paper—some merely amusing but others of a really perilous nature.

Dorothy, however, survived these adventures, Major Dale recovered, and in the end secured a generous legacy which had been left him, which enhancement of the family’s fortune made possible the writing of the second volume of the series: “Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School.”

This story served, too, to introduce more effectually Dorothy’s aunt, Mrs. Winnie White, and her two boys, Nat and Ned, who lived at North Birchlands and with whom Major Dale and his motherless children had now, for some time, made their home. At school Dorothy had some fun, many adventures, and several little troubles; but with the help and companionship of Tavia, who was enabled to go to the school, too, after a very few months both chums decided that Glenwood was the very finest school “that ever happened.”

“Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret” came very nearly being Tavia Travers’ undoing, and that sprightly damsel’s adventures, and her friend’s wholesome influence over her, are fully related in the third volume of the above name.

In the fourth volume, “Dorothy Dale and Her Chums,” Dorothy came into really startling association with some gypsies and their queens; but there is likewise in the story plenty of school fun and excitement and almost a rebellion of the Glenwood girls against a harsh teacher who had charge while Mrs. Pangborn, the principal, was away.

Dorothy and her chums, with the help of Nat and Ned White and some of their friends, solved the mystery of the “castle” in the next volume, which is well entitled, “Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays.” The holidays were queer, indeed, and there was a time when serious trouble seemed to threaten them all.

In “Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days,” the sixth volume of the series, Dorothy was mistaken for a demented girl who had escaped from a sanitarium, and our heroine suffered imprisonment and much anxiety before the mistake was explained. In this, as in “Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals,” the seventh book, Tavia Travers had a prominent part in the action of the story; but Tavia was a flyaway and often Dorothy was anxious about her. The irresponsible Tavia had a heart of gold, however, and her love for Dorothy, and her loyalty to her in any and every difficulty, kept the girl from going very far wrong.

The girls had boarded the train for Glenwood, which had met this obstruction of the burning bridge, after the winter vacation; and that vacation had been spent by Dorothy and Tavia in New York. The account of the fun and adventures they had there is too long to tell here, but it is all related in the volume next preceding this, entitled, “Dorothy Dale in the City.”

The chums not only found the great metropolis a veritable fairyland of surprises, but they had adventures galore. By a fortunate turn of circumstances the two girls were able to save Dorothy’s Aunt Winnie from the machinations of a dishonest real estate agent who had been handling some of that lady’s property; and likewise they had been able to befriend Miss Mingle, the music teacher at Glenwood School, and her invalid sister.

As the other girls were looking after Ned Ebony, and offering her the contents of their own bags—from “mule” slippers to powder-puffs—Dorothy was not needed; so she went back to the railroad station to make sure that no train was made up for Glenwood without her and her friends being aware of it.

There, in the waiting room, she spied a tall, burly woman, with a very hard red face, who had just placed upon one of the benches a little girl of some six or seven years. The child was poorly dressed, and although she was not crying, she looked very woe-begone indeed.

The big woman gave the child a little shake when she had placed her on the bench.

“There now, Celia Moran!” she snapped. “You stay put; will yer? I never seen no child more like an eel than you be.”

“Am—am I really like a—neel, Mrs. Hogan?” demanded the little girl, timidly. “Do—does a—neel have feets an’ hands?”

“You shet up with your questions!” commanded the woman, shaking a finger at her. “As sure as me name’s Ann Hogan I’d never tuk ye from that Findling Asylum if I’d knowed ye had a tongue in your mout’ that’s hung in the middle and wags both ends. Sorra the day I tuk ye!”

Little Celia Moran put a tentative finger in her mouth to see if it was verily so—that her tongue was “hung” different from other people’s tongues.

“Are—are you sure my tongue’s that way, Mrs. Hogan?” she asked, plaintively as the big woman was turning away. “It—it feels all right.”

“Now, you shet up!” warned Mrs. Hogan, wrathfully. “Ax me another question an’ I’ll spank ye—so I will! I’m goin’ now to find Jim Bentley’s waggin’. Do you sit right there still—don’t move! If ye do, I’ll know it when I come back an’ ’twill be the wuss for ye.”

With this threat the big woman departed with an angry stride. Dorothy had stopped to listen to the conversation; and she was greatly interested in the little girl. She immediately went and sat down by Celia Moran.

She was not a very big girl for her age, being thin and “wriggly.” It did seem quite impossible for her to keep either her limbs or her tongue still.

But she was, without doubt, a most appealing little thing. Dorothy smiled at her, and Dorothy’s smile was bound to “make friends” with any one.

“I guess you don’t know me; do you?” asked the child, looking up from under long, black lashes at Dorothy. Those lashes, and the velvety black eyes they almost hid, were all the really pretty features the child possessed. She was not plump enough to be pretty of form, and the expression of her features was too shrewd and worldly-wise to make a child of her age attractive.

“I guess you don’t know me; do you?” she repeated, looking in a sly little way at Dorothy.

“Oh, yes, I do,” declared Dorothy Dale, laughing outright. “You are Celia Moran,” she added, remembering the name the sour-faced woman had used.

“But you don’t know where I come from?”

The ugly gingham uniform she wore told that story only too well. Dorothy became grave at once.

“You come from some orphan asylum, my dear.”

“From the Findling,” said the little girl, pursing up her lips and nodding.

“From a foundling asylum?”

“Yes’m. But I wasn’t really a ‘findling.’ I didn’t come there like the babies do. I was two an’ a ha’f years old when they took me in. That ain’t no baby; is it?”

“Two and a half? Why, that’s a big girl,” agreed Dorothy.

“’Course it is. But my papa had been dead a long time; and my mamma, too. And then my auntie died, so I had to go to the Findling.”

“And wasn’t there anybody else to look out for you?” asked the interested Dorothy.

“Only Tom. And he went away.”

“Tom who?”

“Tom Moran. He’s my brother. I don’t suppose you know him; do you?”

“I don’t think I do,” said Dorothy, shaking her head.

“Oh, you’d remember him—of course,” confided Celia, impressively. “For he is so big, and strong, and—and red-headed. Yes. He’s got awful red hair. And he builds bridges, and things. Oh, I can remember him—just as easy! So I must have been a big girl when they brought me to the Findling.”

“And you haven’t seen your brother since?”

“No’m. And he’d gone away before auntie died. That’s why he doesn’t come for me, I s’pose. So the matron says. He don’t know where I is,” she added, with a little sigh.

“And now Mrs. Hogan’s got me. She’s tooked me to bring up. And she says she’s going to bring me up right strict,” added the child, pursing her lips and shaking her head in her queer, old-fashioned way. “She spects it’s goin’ to be jes’ a job to do it!”

CHAPTER III
THE PROMISE

Dorothy Dale was delighted with the little one; but she pitied her so, too! Covertly the schoolgirl wiped her eyes, while the child prattled on.

“Sometime I know Tom Moran will come for me. Oh, yes! He mus’ be very smart, for he builds bridges and things. My auntie what died told the Findling Asylum matron so. But somehow the letters the matron wrote to Tom Moran never bringed him back.

“Of course, he didn’t get ’em. If he had, he’d come for me. And he’ll come for me anyway, and find me—even if Mrs. Ann Hogan has got me.

“You see, all us Morans is jes’ as smart! Somebody said I was jes’ the cutest little thing they ever see,” and Celia looked up again, slily, at her new friend.

“I really believe you are—you little dear!” cried Dorothy, suddenly hugging her.

“I’m glad you like me so much,” said Celia, quite placidly. “For then you’ll do something for me, I know.”

“Of course I will, my dear,” agreed the older girl.

“Thank you,” said Celia, demurely. “What I want is that you should find Tom Moran for me. If I could jes’ find him once I know I wouldn’t have to stay with Mrs. Hogan. For I jes’ know,” concluded the old-fashioned little thing, shaking her head, “that she’s goin’ to have a—nawful job bringing me up strict—I jes’ know she is!”

“You poor, motherless little thing!” choked Dorothy. “I’ll try my best to find your brother. I really will, dear.”

“That’ll be nice,” confided Celia. “For I think I shall like better bein’ with him than with Mrs. Hogan.”

“And where is Mrs. Hogan going to take you, dear?” asked Dorothy.

“To her farm. A farm is a nawful nice place,” said Celia, gravely. “Was you ever at a farm?”

“Oh, yes.”

“AND WHERE IS MRS. HOGAN GOING TO TAKE YOU, DEAR?”
Dorothy Dale’s Promise. Page [20].

“So was I,” confided Celia. “Last summer. They sends a bunch of us kids from the Findling to a farm—O-o-o, ever so far away from the Findling. And an old lady got me at the station, an’ we drove—O-o-o, ever so far to where there wasn’t any houses, or streets, or wagons, or music machines, or saloons, or delicatessen stores.

“There was just one house where the old lady lived. And it was kinder lonesome; but the grass was there and bushes all flowered out like what’s in the flower-store windows. An’ they smelled sweet,” continued Celia, big eyed with her remembrance of her first experience in the country.

“I felt funny inside—all lonesome, like as though there was a hole here,” and she put her little hands upon her stomach to show where she felt the emotion which she could so ill express—the homesickness for the sights, and sounds, and bustle of the city.

“But the old lady was real nice to me,” confessed Celia. “And she gave me real nice things to eat. And—Oh, yes! she laughed at me so. You see, I was a nawful greeny!”

“I expect you were, dear,” chuckled Dorothy. “You had never seen the country before?”

“No, I never had. And I saw the chickens go to roost, and the old lady caught one chicken and began to pick his feathers off, and that’s when she laughed so at me.”

“Why?” asked Dorothy.

“You see, I didn’t know about it, and I asked her: ‘Do you take off their clo’es every night, lady?’ And of course they don’t,” finished Celia, laughing shrilly herself now. “Chickens ain’t like folks.”

“No; not very much like folks,” agreed Dorothy, greatly amused.

“No. We eat—ed that chicken the next day,” said Celia. “An’ it was nawful good. We don’t have chicken—much—at the Findling.”

“Perhaps it will be nice at Mrs. Hogan’s for you, Celia, dear,” suggested the older girl. “Perhaps it will be as nice as it was at that other farm.”

But the little one shook her head slowly and for the first time the tears welled into her eyes and over-ran them, falling drop by drop down her thin cheeks. She did not sob, or cry, as a child usually does.

“No,” she whispered. “Mrs. Ann Hogan isn’t like the good lady I was with for two weeks las’ summer. No, Mrs. Hogan isn’t like that.”

“But she’ll learn to love you, too,” declared Dorothy, determined to cheer the child if she could.

“No,” said Celia again, gravely. “I’ve got to ‘earn my salt,’ Mrs. Hogan says. An’ I guess I’ll hafter work nawful hard to earn that, for I like things salt,” and she shook her head.

“You see, at that other farm, the lady didn’t make me work. I played. And I watched the birds, and the chickens, and the horses and cows. Why,” she said, her face clearing up with the elasticity of youth, “Why, there was an old man that brought his cow along the road to feed every day. The grass was good beside the road and the old man had no reg’lar lot for her to feed in, so my lady friend said.”

The little old-fashioned way in which she used this last phrase almost convulsed Dorothy, despite her feeling of pity for the child.

“And I used to watch the cow. It was a pleasant cow,” said Celia, gravely. “And sometimes the old man would sit down under a tree in the lane, and he’d open a newspaper an’ read to the cow while she was chewin’ grass. She must ha’ been a real intel’gent cow,” concluded Celia, wagging her little head.

“Oh, dear me! you funny little thing!” murmured Dorothy. “I do wish Tavia could hear you.”

But this she said to herself. Celia Moran talked on, in her old-fashioned way: “No’m; I ain’t goin’ to like it so well at Mrs. Ann Hogan’s. I—I’m ’most afraid of Mrs. Hogan. I—I don’t think she likes little girls a-tall.”

“Oh! I hope she’ll like you,” said Dorothy.

“But you will find my brother, Tom?” urged Celia, earnestly. “Tom Moran will take care of me if he finds me. I know he will.”

“I will do my very best to find him, dear,” promised the bigger girl, again, with her arm about Celia’s shoulders.

In the distance she saw the grenadier Mrs. Hogan approaching, and she had a feeling that the woman would not be pleased if she knew Celia had been talking to anybody.

“Here, dear,” said Dorothy, hastily, drawing out her purse and giving the child a crisp dollar bill. “You hide that away. Maybe you will want to spend some of it for candies, or ribbons, or something. Let me kiss you. You dear little thing! I will try to find your brother just as hard as ever I tried to do anything in my life.”

“I guess you can find him,” returned Celia, with assurance, looking wistfully up at Dorothy Dale. “You’re so big, you know. I want to see you again.”

“And you shall. I’ll find out where Mrs. Hogan lives and come to see you,” declared Dorothy.

But then the big woman came and grabbed the child by the wrist. “Come on, you!” she exclaimed. “We gotter hurry now, for Bentley’s waitin’.”

Celia looked back once over her shoulder as she was borne so hurriedly away. The little, thin face was twisted into a pitiful smile, and Dorothy bore the remembrance of that smile in her heart for many a long day.

Mrs. Hogan had been so abrupt that Dorothy had not plucked up courage to accost her. When she asked one of the railroad men if he knew where Jim Bentley, or Mrs. Hogan, lived, the man had never heard the names.

There was no time then to seek further for the locality of the farm to which little Celia Moran was being taken, for a train was backing down beside the platform and the conductor told her it would start in ten minutes for Glenwood.

So Dorothy ran to gather her scattered flock of schoolmates. Ned Ebony’s coat was dry enough to put on; but she had to go dressed in a conglomeration of other garments, some of which did not fit her very well. Tavia and the others made much fun over Edna’s plight.

“That hat!” groaned Tavia. “It—it looks just like you’d had it in pawn, Ned.”

“In pawn! what do you mean?” queried Edna, doubtfully, and putting up both hands to the really disgraceful-looking hat—for it had been dried out before the sitting room stove at the railroad station agent’s, too.

“Anyway, it looks like it had been in soak, Neddie, dear,” giggled Tavia. “And to use a slang phrase——”

“I should say that was slang,” returned Edna, in disgust. “The very commonest kind—‘in soak,’ indeed!”

“And that bird on your hat,” pursued Tavia, wickedly. “That is sure enough one of those extinct fowl you read about.”

“Lots you know about extinct birds,” sniffed Edna.

“There’s the dodo,” suggested one of the other girls.

“Oh, I know what an extinct bird is,” declared Cologne. “It’s Billy, our poor old canary—poor thing! The cat got him this morning before I left home, so he’s extinct now!”

Ned Ebony couldn’t take her coat off because she wore Dorothy’s morning gown instead of a street dress. And she had on Tavia’s slippers instead of real shoes; and there hadn’t been a guimpe in any girl’s bag that would fit her, so she was afraid of removing the coat as she might catch cold. She had been used to wearing a fur-piece around her neck and that much bedraggled article was in the big bundle of her half-dried belongings, thrust into the baggage rack overhead.

“I know that fur is just ruined,” she moaned. “And it’s brand new, too.”

“Never mind,” giggled Tavia. “I bet it’s only cat’s fur, and there’s slathers of cats at the Glen. We can trap some and make you a new scarf just as good.”

“Miss Smartie!”

“I declare, Ned, you looked just like a half-drowned pussy-cat yourself when Doro hauled you ashore.”

“Yes,” complained Edna, “you others would have left me to swim out as best I might alone—no doubt of that. It is always Doro who comes to the rescue.”

Dorothy smiled half-heartedly. She did not join the general cross-fire of joking and repartee. She could not get the wan little face of Celia Moran out of her mind—that wistful little smile of hers—while she seemed to hear again the sweet little voice say: “An’ I’m jes’ the cutest little thing you ever see!”

But Dorothy was afraid that, as cute as she was, the ogress would be too much for her!

“That’s just what that Hogan woman is—an ogress,” thought Dorothy.

Celia had been woefully afraid of Mrs. Hogan; yet how brave she had been, too!

“Somehow I’ll find her brother—Tom Moran—for her,” thought Dorothy. “I will! I must!”

CHAPTER IV
A PORCINE PICNIC

There were five bows of ribbon laid out in a row on Tavia’s bureau, each with a cunning little collar of the same attached. Pink, green—real apple green—mauve, tango and orange.

“What under the sun can she be doing with those?” murmured Dorothy, when she chanced to see them, and touching the pretty bows lightly with her fingers. “Why! Tavia must be going to introduce a new style. Are they ribbon bracelets? How pretty!”

It was the day following the hilarious arrival of “the bad pennies” at Glenwood School, after the railroad bridge had burned and delayed them, and Dorothy herself had met little Celia Moran, the girl from the “Findling.”

Mrs. Pangborn had not yet arrived. She had been delayed by some family difficulty, it was understood, and really, for these first days of the new term, “things were going every which-way,” as Tavia herself declared.

There was a new teacher in charge, too—Miss Olaine. Miss Olaine was tall, and thin, and grim. Tavia declared she looked just like “a sign post on the road to trouble.”

“And you want to be careful you don’t fall under her eye, Tavia,” Cologne had advised. “The girls who have been here through the vacation say she’s a Tartar.”

“Humph!” the headstrong Tavia had declared, “she may be the cream of Tartar, for all I care. I shall take the starch out of her.”

Now, had Dorothy Dale chanced to hear this reckless promise of her chum she might have been more suspicious of the five pretty ribbon bows. Indeed, she would have been suspicious of every particular thing Tavia said, or did.

But, as it chanced, Miss Olaine seemed no more harsh or forbidding to Dorothy than any other teacher. Dorothy was not one to antagonize the teachers, no matter who they might be.

“Five bows,” murmured Dorothy again. “I wonder just what they can be for? Why, they’re too small, I do believe—those rings are—for Tavia’s wrist—or mine.

“Five of them! One for each finger of a hand—one for each of the ‘five senses,’ I declare!—one for each of Jacob Bensell’s young ones who live in the cottage down the road. There’s five of them.

“And there’s five cows in Middleton’s pasture—though I don’t suppose Tavia is going to decorate them. And there’s five cunning little pigs in Jake’s pen—he showed them to me last night,” and Dorothy laughed, as she touched the pretty bows again. “I can’t imagine——”

In bounced Tavia herself. “Oh, you here?” she cried, and went right over to the bureau and tumbled the five pretty ribbon bows into her top drawer and shut the drawer quickly.

“I got here just a minute ahead of you,” said Dorothy.

“Oh!”

“What are the cunning little wristlets for?” demanded Dorothy, curiously.

“‘Wristlets’?”

“You know what I mean. The ribbons?”

“Oh—now—Doro——”

“What are they for?” repeated Dorothy.

“Just to make curious folk ask questions, I guess,” chuckled Tavia, her big brown eyes dancing, and just then several of the other girls tumbled into the room and there was so much noise and talk that Dorothy quite forgot the ribbon bows.

“That old Olaine is just the meanest——” from Cologne.

“Did you hear what she said to little Luttrell when she couldn’t find her skates? And Luttrell’s folks can’t buy her skates every day, I don’t believe,” declared Ned Ebony, hotly.

“Did you hear her, Doro?” demanded Nita Brent.

“No,” admitted Dorothy Dale.

“Why, she told Luttrell not to cry like a baby about it; probably somebody found them that needed them more than she did. Nasty old——”

“Hold on! Hold on!” advised Dorothy.

Tavia laughed rather harshly. “Miss Olaine is just as comforting as the rooster was when Mrs. Hen was in tears because one of her little ones had been sacrificed to make a repast for the visiting clergyman.

“‘Cheer up, Madam,’ said Mr. Rooster. ‘You should rejoice that your son is entering the ministry. He was poorly qualified for a lay member, anyhow,’” and Tavia laughed again, as did the others.

“Oh, Tavia, that’s ridiculous,” said Cologne. “Aren’t you sorry for little Luttrell?”

“And don’t you just hate Miss Olaine?” demanded Ebony.

“Oh, you leave her to me,” said Tavia, cheerfully. “We’ll get square with her if she stays at Glenwood Hall for long.”

“You would better have a care,” warned Dorothy. “I don’t believe that the lady will stand much fooling, Tavia.”

“‘Fooling’?” repeated Tavia, making “big eyes” at her chums. “How you talk! I would not fool with Miss Olaine——”

“I guess not,” cried one of the other girls. “I heard what she said to Miss Mingle.”

“What was that?”

“She said ‘she hoped she knew how to handle a lot of half-grown, saucy young-ones!’ Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Us—young-ones!” gasped Dorothy.

“What a slap at our dignity—and we to graduate in June,” said Cologne, heavily. “I guess that settles Miss Olaine——”

“You leave her to me,” said Tavia, again, and nodding with emphasis. “I shall just square things up with her.”

“Oh, Tavia!” cried Edna Black. “What will you do?”

“Nothing at all, I hope,” interposed Dorothy.

Her chum began to giggle. “You just wait,” she said.

“Do, do be careful,” warned Dorothy when the other girls had gone some time later, leaving her and her chum alone in the dormitory.

“Am I not always careful?” demanded Tavia, opening her big eyes wider than ever.

“You’re usually careful to get into trouble,” sighed Dorothy.

“Oh, Doro——”

“And see the numbers of times the rest of us have had to help you out.”

“You mean you have had to help me out. You’re a good old thing, Doro—just like a grandma to me! Come and kiss your youngest grandchild, Doro—that’s a dear!”

“Go away, do!” cried Dorothy, though she had to laugh at Tavia, too. “You are as irresponsible as ever.”

“Of course, Granny,” giggled Tavia, as she put a wee dab of talcum powder on her nose.

“But don’t you dare do anything to make Mrs. Pangborn send you home before you are properly graduated,” warned Dorothy.

“Suspended from the Glen? Well, I guess not!” cried her friend.

But there was something in the air. Dorothy knew it. Nobody else seemed to be in the secret but Tavia, however; and for Tavia to have any secret at all from her chum——

Well, Dorothy could only wait. She was sure Tavia “would show her hand” before long. But this time the prank was revealed to Dorothy too late for the latter to save her fly-away friend from the results of her folly.

The next evening she saw Tavia lurking in the shadow of the hedge down towards Bensell’s place. Was that Jake’s oldest boy who ran away when Dorothy approached?

“My goodness! how you startled me!” drawled Tavia when Dorothy pinched her chum’s plump arm.

“Can’t you let them be in peace, Tavia?” laughed Dorothy, who knew very well that her chum had not been startled at all.

“What? Oh! Let who be in peace?” demanded Tavia, and then Dorothy, in amaze, knew her friend was startled.

“The boys. Have you got to practice your fell designs on Sammy Bensell?”

“How ridiculous!” chuckled Tavia, with a toss of her head, and plainly relieved. “Poor Sammy!”

And even then Dorothy had not suspected the secret. Tavia went back to the Hall with her. Everything seemed as calm as could be. And then, the next forenoon, when recitations began in Miss Olaine’s room, the storm broke.

Behind the desk and platform devoted to the teacher’s use was the door of a little retiring room. Soon after the class assembled there were peculiar noises heard in that room. Miss Olaine stood up and looked at the door.

“Who is in that room, young ladies?” she demanded.

Silence—oh, a great deal of silence! You could cut it with a knife.

And the most amazed-looking person in the room was Tavia Travers. Miss Olaine threw open the door with a savage sort of exclamation. The next instant she shrieked shrilly, and hopped into the seat of her own chair, standing upright there and holding her skirts close about her ankles.

“Who did this? Who did such an atrocious thing?” cried the teacher.

Out of the room there ran a cunning little white and black pig—and then another, and another, until the laughing, half-hysterical girls counted five of the little dears.

Each was scrubbed as clean as ever pig before was scrubbed! And their little pink eyes, and sharp noses, and pricked-up ears, and queer little tails, made the cunning little things as pretty as lapdogs.

“Who’d suppose she was afraid of pigs?” Edna Black said afterward. “And they so cute!”

But Miss Olaine shrieked and shrieked, as the pigs, each with one of those beautiful ribbon bows at the back of its fat neck, ran around and around her chair and desk. The platform was so high that they were afraid to jump down, for they were not more than two spans long.

“Oh, dear me!” groaned Dorothy. “Now Tavia is in for it again,” for Tavia looked altogether too innocent to escape suspicion.

CHAPTER V
A MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLEHILL

“Who did this?” demanded the teacher, from her perch. “Who dared commit such an atrocious act? Take them aw-a-ay!”

Her cry ending in such a wail, and her appearance suggesting approaching hysterics, Dorothy ran forward and tried to “shoo” the little piglets back into the closet. But most of the other girls were laughing so outrageously that they could not help, and the little squealers would not “shoo” worth a cent!

“Are you guilty of this deed, Miss Dale?” demanded Miss Olaine, seizing a ruler from the desk and trying to strike one of the pigs.

“Oh, don’t hurt the cunning little things!” cried Dorothy. “Please don’t, Miss Olaine. Oh!”

One of the little fellows got a crack from the ruler and his little tail straightened out and he made a noise like a rusty gate-hinge.

“Oh, oh! Please don’t!” begged Dorothy.

“Please don’t, Miss Olaine. I’ll get them all shut up——”

Just then the two that she had managed to get into the closet again, ran out. The teacher was recovering from her fright; but her rage grew apace.

“You are guilty of this outrage, Miss Dale!” she accused. “You shall be punished for it—indeed yes!”

“You are mistaken, Miss Olaine,” said Dorothy, ceasing to chase the tiny porkers, and facing the teacher standing in the chair.

“You did! You did it!” ejaculated the panting teacher. “You know all about the beasts——”

Then she let out another yell. One of the little fellows stood on its hind legs against Miss Olaine’s chair and tried to sniff at that lady’s boots.

“Get them back into that closet!” commanded Miss Olaine, savagely, and glaring at Dorothy. “Then I’ll ’tend to you, Miss.”

The whole class was silent by this time—“all but the pigs,” as one of the girls whispered. They were astonished to hear Dorothy accused by the teacher—more astonished than they had been by the advent of the pigs in the classroom. As Ned Ebony pointed out afterward, pigs, or anything else, might come to recitation; but for Dorothy Dale to be accused of such a prank as this was quite too shocking!

Now, Dorothy was usually pretty sweet tempered; but the manner in which the new teacher spoke to her—and her unfair decision that she, Dorothy, was guilty of the prank—hurt and angered the girl.

She lifted her head grandly and looked Miss Olaine straight in the eye.

“You may get rid of the pigs yourself, as far as I am concerned,” she said, distinctly. “We are not in the habit of being accused of things at Glenwood Hall without there being some evidence against us.”

She whirled around and went to her seat. Miss Olaine fairly screamed after her: “Come back here, Miss Saucebox, and get rid of these pigs.”

“They’re not my pigs,” said Dorothy, resuming her seat, coolly.

“They’re Jake Bensell’s pigs, Miss Olaine,” piped up one of the girls from a back seat.

“Run and get Mr. Bensell at once,” commanded the teacher. “I’ll get to the bottom of this——”

She almost pitched out of the chair then, and all the pigs ran out of the closet again and gamboled about the platform. Miss Olaine was held prisoner in her chair—“like a statue of Liberty defying the lightning” Tavia whispered to Edna.

“She’s an awfully funny statue,” giggled Ned. “But you’ve got Liberty and Ajax mixed, Tavia.”

Miss Olaine would not allow any of the other girls to help her after Dorothy had retreated. She waited impatiently until the girl who had run for Jake Bensell returned with the farmer in tow.

“Is your name Bensell?” demanded Miss Olaine from her perch on the chair.

“Yes, ma’am!” admitted Jake.

“Are these your pigs—these nasty beasts?”

Jake scratched his head slowly, and grinned. “I expect they be; but they air kinder dressed up,” he said. “I heard the old one carryin’ on all this mawnin’; but I didn’t know the litter had strayed clean over here to school,” and he chuckled.

“Take the insufferable creatures out of here!” commanded Miss Olaine. “And I believe you knew something about this disgusting exhibition of Tom-foolery!”

“Eh? No, ma’am! I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it,” declared Jake. “And I’ll have to go home for a bag to put them in——”

“Get them out of this room at once!” cried Miss Olaine. “I cannot stand this another minute.”

Hysteria was threatening again. Jake drew a handful of corn from his pocket. The little pigs were just about big enough to begin to eat corn. He dropped a few kernels on the platform, trailed it along to the door of the small room, and then threw the rest of the corn inside. In two minutes the last curly-cued tail disappeared within, and Jake closed the door on them.

“You kin come down, ma’am,” he said, with a chuckle. “I’ll go home for a bag, and I’ll step into that room through the winder—it’s open—and gather ’em all up.”

“They must have been put in at that window,” remarked Miss Olaine, suspiciously, and breathing heavily after sitting down again. “What do you know about it, sir?”

“Nothing a-tall—I assure ye,” chuckled Jake.

“Those horrid beasts could not have got into that open window without help,” snapped the teacher.

“I dunno,” said the farmer, gracelessly. “They wander a good ways now——”

“I believe you are in league with that girl!” and she pointed her finger at Dorothy.

“Miss Dorothy? My goodness, no!” gasped Jake. “I’m dead sure she ain’t in it,” he added.

“Why not, sir?”

“’Cause she ain’t never into no such practical jokes——”

“Jokes!” cried Miss Olaine. “She’ll find it’s no joke. It—it is a crime! She should be instantly dismissed. Oh, if Mrs. Pangborn were only here——”

Jake retreated, shaking his head. The class was in a buzz of excitement. Dorothy was angry enough to reply in heat to Miss Olaine; but she had bethought herself now that she was likely to make the real culprit more trouble if she “fought back.”

Of course that “real culprit” was Tavia. The practical joke had assumed rather serious proportions, however. Tavia looked commiseratingly at Dorothy. When she caught her friend’s eye she mouthed:

“I’ll tell her I did it, Doro.”

“Don’t you do it!” snapped Dorothy, almost out loud. “Let her find it out herself—if she can.”

Dorothy was quite furious—to be doubted and insulted in this public way! She was almost glad that Tavia had originated the foolish joke with the cunning little pigs. Only—she well knew—in the end, Tavia must suffer for it.

Miss Olaine was not a person to give up the trail so easily. Edna whispered that she would be “a red Indian” on the scent of the joker. Poor Tavia would have to “take it” in the end; for of course she would not let Dorothy suffer for her sins.

The recitation hour drew to a close. Miss Olaine rapped for order at last. “Miss Dale will remain,” she said.

The other girls looked at Dorothy, and she sat down. But Tavia got up with an exclamation and tramped up to the desk.

“You can let her go, Miss Olaine,” she declared. “Doro had nothing to do with the pigs. I did it.”

“What is that?” demanded the teacher, stiffening and turning very red.

“Doro didn’t have anything to do with putting the pigs in at the window. I did it before recitation. Doro didn’t even know I was going to do it.”

Tavia was defiant, and held her head up. Miss Olaine seemed to be doubly enraged because she had been deluded into making a mistake in the identity of the culprit.

“Why didn’t you tell me so?” she demanded of Dorothy.

“I told you I was not guilty,” replied Dorothy.

“But why didn’t you tell me who was at fault?”

The girls all chorused a gasp of dismay. Dorothy actually turned pale with anger.

“To tell on another girl?” she cried. “We don’t do things like that in Glenwood Hall, Miss Olaine.”

“You are saucy, Miss!” declared the teacher. “Let me tell you that Mrs. Pangborn shall hear of your impudence when she returns. As for you, Octavia—is that your name?”

“So they tell me, Miss Olaine,” returned Tavia, drawling in her speech.

“You go into this room!” commanded Miss Olaine, pointing at the door behind which the piglets had been shut. “You will find company there quite of your own kind, Miss. Come, march! I tell you, I mean to be obeyed. Go in there, Octavia.”

“Oh—of course—if you mean it,” said Tavia, lightly. “And the company of the pigs will be preferred to some I might mention.”

But this last the graceless girl was wise enough to murmur too low for the teacher to hear. She went into the closet-like room instantly. The girls at once heard the pigs begin squealing. Tavia was rescuing the pretty ribbons before Mr. Bensell should return for his five little porkers.

Miss Olaine did not speak to Dorothy again, so the latter followed the other girls out of the classroom. Cologne was saying:

“She just made a mountain out of a molehill. It wasn’t nothing—just a joke. And now she is going to tear the whole school up by the roots about it.”

“You are just right, Rose-Mary,” agreed Ned Ebony.

“Bear it in mind,” said Dorothy, firmly, “we are going to have a lot of trouble while that teacher remains in Glenwood School. Oh, dear me! I didn’t think I ever should be glad to leave the Glen for good; but if Miss Olaine stays till June I know I shall be delighted to get away from here.”

“Me, too!” “And I!” “And we-uns!” was the chorused agreement to this statement.

CHAPTER VI
DOROTHY IS “POUNCED UPON”

Dorothy had two very serious problems in her mind all the time, and they sometimes interfered with the problems put forth by Miss Olaine to the class. The girl wanted to know where Mrs. Ann Hogan had her farm; and she wondered how she was to begin, even, to get into communication with Tom Moran, the big, redheaded brother that little Celia remembered “just as easy!”

“It’s easy enough to guess where Celia came from—the ‘Findling,’ I mean. There’s only one foundling asylum in the county and that is in the city. Celia has been used to the city all her life. I can write to the matron of the city children’s asylum and find out all she knows about Celia and her folks.

“But even she wasn’t able to find Tom Moran. It’s pretty sure that Celia knew what she was talking about. She has got a big brother, and he went off to work before his aunt died, thinking he had left Celia in good care.

“‘He builds bridges, and things.’ That’s what Celia says. Those sort of men travel about a good deal. What does the paper call them—now—‘bridge and structural iron workers?’ Isn’t that it? And they have a very strong union.

“I’ve heard daddy talking about them,” quoth Dorothy Dale. “And I’ve read about them in the papers, too. Very brave, hardy men they are, and they build the steel framework of the big office buildings—the great, tall skyscrapers—as well as bridges.

“Now, Tom Moran might have gone clear across the continent, following his job. Or he might be right around here somewhere. If he’s just one of the ordinary workmen I suppose he belongs to the union. If he’s a foreman, or something big in the work, he might not belong to the union; but they would know his name, just the same.

“Now!” reflected Dorothy. “I don’t believe that asylum matron ever thought to ask the union, in all these four years little Celia has been in her care. I’ll look up the local headquarters in the directory, and write them a nice letter about Tom Moran.

“As for learning where Mrs. Hogan has taken Celia, I’ll inquire of every farmer I see. Mrs. Hogan’s farm can’t be very far from here.”

Dorothy Dale had come to these conclusions before ever Tavia got into trouble with Miss Olaine, and been shut up in the dressing-room with the pigs.

She had, indeed, gone to Mrs. Pangborn’s office immediately after the recitation hour in which Tavia had fallen into disgrace, to look in the city directory for the address she wished to discover.

The older pupils were allowed to refer to the school reference books, and the like, as they chose. Mrs. Pangborn never objected to their doing so.

Therefore Dorothy’s surprise was the greater when, as she bent over the book she desired to consult, a harsh voice demanded:

“What are you doing in here, Miss? Is this the place for you at this hour?”

It was Miss Olaine, and she was grimmer than before. Dorothy was more than ever sure that she would continually clash with this teacher.

“I was looking for something, Miss Olaine,” the girl said, stiffly.

“Ask permission when you want to come into the office,” snapped the teacher. “And recitation hour is not the time for idling about. What is your class, Miss?”

“I have half an hour with Miss Mingle next. But she isn’t ready for me,” replied Dorothy.

“Humph! that is an extra. You may skip that to-day and go to your next regular recitation.”

“But my music——”

“I have charge here, Miss Dale. You and your friends would better understand it. I find the entire first class almost unmanageable. Aren’t you due at rhetoric and grammar?”

“If Miss Mingle had not called me—yes,” said Dorothy, feeling revolutionary. Miss Olaine certainly was trying!

“Go to your class, then—at once!” commanded the teacher. “And remember that while I am in charge of Glenwood School, you girls do not have free access to this office. Ask permission if you wish to consult any book here.”

And Dorothy had not found the address she desired! She went out of the room very angry at heart with Miss Olaine. She was so angry, in fact, that she felt just like disobeying her flatly!

That was not like sensible Dorothy. To antagonize the teacher would aid nobody; yet she felt just like doing so.

Instead of mounting the stairs to the classroom in which the present recitation was under way, and from which she had been excused for her music lesson, she ran out of the building altogether and went around to the window of the dressing-room where Tavia was confined.

Tavia must have reached the window by the aid of a stepladder, for it was quite high from the ground. Now the stepladder had been removed, the window was closed, and Dorothy was not at first sure that her friend was still in durance there.

“Tavia!” she called.

It was not until she had spoken the name twice that Tavia’s face appeared at the pane. Then the girl inside opened the window and smiled broadly down upon her chum.

“Is the ogress about?” asked Tavia.

“She’s in the office. I just had a flare-up with her,” admitted Dorothy.

“Oh, don’t you get into trouble over me, Doro,” begged Tavia. “It isn’t worth while.”

“What is she going to do with you?”

“Boil me in oil, or some pleasant little pastime like that,” chuckled Tavia.

“Do be sensible.”

“I can’t. I’m lonesome. They’ve taken away the pigs.”

“Oh, dear me, Tavia! That was a dreadful trick. How did you manage it?”

“Hist! cross your heart? Well, Sammy and I did it. But his father mustn’t know, for if he does Sammy says he’ll get ‘lambasted’—whatever that may be.”

“Well, I’m sorry you’re lonesome,” Dorothy said. “But Miss Olaine isn’t likely to pity you any on that score——”

A window was raised swiftly, and the teacher appeared. She must have been watching Dorothy from the office, and had come around here to this side of the building particularly to spy upon her.

“So!” she exclaimed. “You flaunt me, do you, Miss Dale? Didn’t I tell you to go to your class?”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Dorothy. “And I was going——”

“But you will take your own time about it, eh?” snapped the lady. “You may come in here at once. And tell that other girl to close her window.”

Tavia made a dreadful face and slammed down her window. Of course, Miss Olaine could not see the grimace.

“Come in here to me at once,” repeated Miss Olaine, and Dorothy obeyed.

The teacher waited for her in the classroom. Dorothy had not felt so disturbed and angry with a teacher since she and Tavia were little girls and had got into trouble with Miss Ellis in the old Dalton public school!

“Now, young lady,” snapped Miss Olaine, “you may go into that room and remain with your friend until I choose to release you both. And I hope Mrs. Pangborn will return in season to take the responsibility of your further punishment off my hands.”

“Gracious!” exclaimed Tavia, quite loud enough for the teacher to hear, when Dorothy was rudely thrust into the dressing closet by the shoulders, “she thinks hanging’s too good for us, doesn’t she, Doro?”

But Dorothy was too angry to reply at first. She felt that the new teacher had gone quite beyond her rights in handling the matter. To push her into the room so!

“Why,” thought Dorothy, “she might as well have struck me! And Mrs. Pangborn would not have allowed such a thing. We—we are almost grown up. It is an insult.”

But she said nothing like this to Tavia. Besides, Tavia had brought punishment upon her own head in the first place by her practical joke. At the moment, Dorothy could not see that she was in anyway at fault. Miss Olaine had just “pounced upon” her, with neither right nor reason on her side!

“And here we are, shut into this little old room,” croaked Tavia. “Not even pigs for company.”

“Do be quiet, Tavia,” begged Dorothy. “You’ll have her back—and she’ll do something worse to us.”

“Here’s some books on the shelf,” said her friend. “Oh, dear! I wish they were story books. Only old textbooks.”

“All right,” said Dorothy, more cheerfully. “Let’s get up lessons for to-morrow.”

“That’s no fun!” cried Tavia, objecting.

“But it will help to pass away the time. I’m going to do it,” said Dorothy, firmly.

“Well—I may as well, too,” said Tavia, sighing.

There was a small table and two chairs. They opened the books and sat down to study. The noon luncheon hour came and went and nobody came near the prisoners. Of course, long before this, Tavia had made sure the door was locked.

“Not even bread and water,” groaned Tavia. “She means to starve us into subjection, Doro.”

“I wish Mrs. Pangborn would come home,” said Dorothy Dale.

“We’ll be living skeletons before then,” groaned her friend.

But when it grew dark Miss Olaine appeared at the door. She brought a tray upon which was a small pitcher of skimmed milk, and two slices of very dry bread.

“Your supper, young ladies—and quite good enough for you,” she declared. “Mrs. Pangborn will be at home on the midnight train. I have just received a telegram from her. You shall remain here until she arrives. Then I shall gladly wash my hands of you.”

“My goodness! she can wash her hands just as soon as she likes, for all of me,” exclaimed Tavia. “A slice of bread and milk! why, I could eat a house, I’m so starved!”

CHAPTER VII
A RAID

Dorothy found a match on the shelf and lit the gas. It had grown pitch dark outside, and she drew the curtain, too.

“Just as snug as a bug in a rug,” quoted Tavia, chuckling. “Only we can’t eat the rug, as the bug might, and so reduce our awful appetites. Couldn’t you eat a whole ox, Doro?”

“And a minute ago you wanted to eat a house,” said Dorothy. “Think of something more appropriate.”

“I will. Nice, thin slices of boiled ham between soft white bread—plenty of butter and some mustard—not too much. Pickles—just the very sourest kind. Some chicken salad with fresh lettuce leaves—home-made dressing, no bottled stuff. Stuffed olives. Peanut butter between graham crackers—m-m-m! lovely! celery. And a big piece of frosted cake——”

“Stop!” commanded Dorothy. “Do you want to drive me quite into insurrection?”

“I am already an insurrecto,” declared Tavia. “And I believe I can get just the sort of banquet I have outlined.”

“At some nice hotel—in New York?”

“I know what they were going to have for supper to-night,” declared Tavia, and walked over to examine the locked door.

“Do you mean to say we are going to have that kind of a supper?” demanded Dorothy, tragically. “And we under arrest?”

“M-m-m!” said Tavia, thoughtfully. “See here, Doro! Got a hammer?”

“A hammer? Of course! A whole tool chest in my pocket.”

“Something to hammer with, then,” said Tavia, earnestly. “If I had one I could open this door.”

“It’s locked.”

“Of course it is. But the hinges are on this side.”

“Oh! you need a screw-driver!” cried Dorothy, coming over to her.

“Nothing of the kind. I want something to knock out these pins—don’t you see? Then we can lift the door off its hinges and pull the bolt out of the lock. Ha!”

“What is it?”

“I’ve got it!” cried Tavia, under her breath, and immediately dropped down upon the floor and began to take off her shoe.

Quick as it was off, she grasped the shoe by the foot and used the heel to start the pin of the lower hinge. In a moment the steel pin popped out; then Tavia knocked out the one in the upper hinge.

“Now for it, Doro,” whispered the bright girl. “Put out the gas, so if anybody should be watching. That’s it. Now—take hold and ease off the door. No noise now, my lady!”

The girls managed to pull the door toward them, got a firm hold upon the edge of it, and pried the bolt loose. The door was shoved back against the wall of the room and they could look out into the empty classroom. Light from out of doors—and that very faint—was all that illuminated the larger apartment.

“Oh! if she catches us!” gasped Dorothy.

“Don’t you fret. This is a regular hunger strike—just as though we were suffragettes and had been imprisoned. Only we don’t refuse to eat; we just refuse not to eat,” and Tavia giggled as she hastily laced up her shoe again.

“Now, don’t you dare be afraid. I’m going on a raid, Doro. Kiss me good-bye, dear. If I never should retur-r-rn—— Blub! blub! My handkerchief isn’t big enough to cry into. Lend me yours.

“‘Farewell, farewell, my own tr-r-rue lo-o-ove! Farewell-er, farewell-er’——

“I go where glory waits me—don’t you forget that, Doro. And something to eat, too, better than bread and milk. Hist!”

After this rigamarole, and with the stride of a stage villain, Tavia left the classroom. She did not ask, or expect, Dorothy to take part in the raid on the pantry; indeed, had there been any good in doing so, Dorothy would have advised against the scheme.

Perhaps the girls had a right to a decent supper. At least, Dorothy had done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment from Miss Olaine. So both she and her chum defied the decree of the teacher. They’d actually be starved by midnight, when Mrs. Pangborn was expected to arrive.

If Tavia was caught——

Dorothy went to the corridor door and held it ajar, listening. Sometimes she heard girls’ laughter in the upper stories. A teacher passed, but did not see the girl behind the door. By and by there was another stealthy tread.

Miss Olaine? No! It was a girl with her arms full.

“Oh, Tavia!”

“It’s me! Lemme in,” exclaimed the raider, in a whisper. “Quick, now! We must get that door on its hinges again. And such a scrumptious lay-out, Doro! Mm-m-m!”

They did not light the gas. Tavia “unloaded” upon the table. “Mercy on us! the butter’s flatter than a pancake,” she breathed. “And the mayonnaise is all over the napkin. But never mind. We can lick it off!” chuckled this reckless bandit.

“Let’s get the door back,” urged Dorothy.

“Right!” Tavia came to her assistance. They lifted it back into place; only Tavia turned the key which had been left in the lock, and put the key on the inside of the door.

“What for?” demanded the anxious Dorothy.

“We won’t run the risk of having the ogress get in and spoil our supper,” declared Tavia. “Then—the door goes on easier.”

They got it hung in half a minute; then Tavia turned the key in the lock.

“If worse comes to worst,” she said, “we’ll throw the key out of the window and let her hunt for the person who unlocked our door, gave us the supper, and ran away with the key.”

“Oh, Tavia! We’ll both get into serious trouble.”

“Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof,” misquoted Tavia. “Now the gas! Let me spread this out. What do you think of this banquet, Doro?”

Dorothy could not refuse her share of the goodies. There was all that Tavia had promised. She seemed to have known to the last item just what the pantry had contained. And she had brought a bottle of real fizzy sarsaparilla and two glasses.

“Do you think I’d let a person like Miss Olaine get the best of me?” demanded Tavia, with pride. “Bread and milk, indeed! Well, I guess——”

“Hush!” whispered Dorothy.

There was a firm step in the classroom. They heard it mount the platform and then came a fumbling at the door.

“Oh! she’s found us out,” breathed Dorothy, seizing Tavia’s wrist.

“She’s found us in, you mean,” returned her friend, almost exploding with laughter. “And what more can she expect?”

“Girls!” exclaimed Miss Olaine’s harsh voice.

No answer. “Girls!” repeated the teacher. “Miss Dale! Miss Octavia!”

“Yes, ma’am!” drawled Tavia, yawning prodigiously. “Yes, ma’am!”

“You need not tell me you were asleep,” snapped the teacher. “Where is the key to this door?”

Tavia had removed the key from the lock and now held it up for Dorothy to see. Then she laid it on the window sill before she answered:

“I’m sure, Miss Olaine, I haven’t the key. You locked us in——”

“And I left the key in the door, Miss Impertinence,” interposed the teacher.

“If the key was on the outside and we are on the inside,” said Tavia, calmly, “of course you do not accuse us of appropriating it, Miss Olaine?”

“Somebody has been here, Miss. I demand to know who it was.”

“I can tell you truthfully, Miss Olaine,” said Tavia, still calmly, “that I have seen nobody at the door.”

“Miss Dale, where is the key?”

Like a flash Tavia opened the lower sash and threw the key out into the darkness. She pointed to Dorothy and mouthed the words she was to say—and they were perfectly truthful:

“Say you don’t know where!” commanded Tavia, in this silent way.

“Miss Dale!” exclaimed the teacher again. “Do you know where the key is?”

“No.”

“Is that all you can say, Miss?”

“We have not got it—of that I am sure,” declared Dorothy.

Tavia had calmly gone back to her salad and peanut butter sandwiches. Her mouth was so full when Miss Olaine spoke to her again that she could hardly answer.

“Miss Octavia Travers! Who removed the key from this lock? You know who it was.”

“I’m—I’m——”

“What is the matter with you? Your mouth is full. You are eating, Miss. Where did you get the food? Who has been here and supplied you with more than I gave you at supper time?”

“There hasn’t been a soul at that door except yourself,” declared Tavia, exactly, “as far as I know.”

“You are not telling the truth, Miss!” declared the teacher, warmly.

Mrs. Pangborn’s system of conducting Glenwood Hall did not include doubting the word of her pupils. The girls were put on their honor from the hour they first entered the school, and seldom had the principal been taken advantage of.

Dorothy and Tavia looked at each other. Both were flushed and all the laughter had gone out of Tavia’s brown eyes.

“Why, how horrid!” she gasped.

“What is that, Miss?” demanded the angry teacher outside.

And then Dorothy spoke up. “We refuse to discuss the matter with you any further, Miss Olaine—until Mrs. Pangborn arrives. In this school the girls are not accused of falsehoods.”

Miss Olaine was silent a moment. Then they heard her walk heavily away from the locked door.

CHAPTER VIII
CONDITIONS

“Two of the girls shut up in the little dressing-room? And the key missing? Suppose there should be a fire, Miss Olaine?”

Mrs. Pangborn had just arrived. She had not even removed her bonnet, only untied its strings. And she sat with her feet on the fender of the open fire place where the gaslog burned in the office. It was a half hour after midnight and Glenwood Hall was supposed to be as silent as the tomb at that time.

“I thought of that. It is a trick,” said the dark teacher, hastily, and wringing her hands together in the peculiar way she had. It showed that Miss Olaine was a very nervous person.

“How do you mean—a trick?” asked the principal, quietly.

“Some person in league with the two girls removed the key, of course. I am sure it was done so as to keep me out while they ate forbidden food.”

“But did they not have their supper?”

“Bread and milk; quite enough for them.”

“And for luncheon? You say they were shut into the room in the forenoon.”

“I—I thought it would bring them to terms quicker. A little fast surely would not hurt them,” said Miss Olaine, hesitatingly.

“Perhaps not,” agreed Mrs. Pangborn, after a moment of silence, but looking at her new assistant in rather a curious way. “However, I do not approve of corporal punishment——”

“Corporal punishment!”

“Yes. Underfeeding must come under that head,” said Mrs. Pangborn, but with a laugh. “And you think they somehow tricked you and got more supper than you intended?”

“I am positive. I have been to the pantry. That door should be locked——”

“Oh, no!” cried the principal. “I never lock things away from my girls.”

“A mistake, Mrs. Pangborn,” declared the assistant, with growing confidence. “Youth is naturally treacherous.”

“Oh, my dear Miss Olaine!” exclaimed the principal of Glenwood. “I am sorry your experience has led to that belief. Mine has not—and it has the advantage of yours in extent of time,” and she smiled again.

“I am sure, Miss Olaine, you and I are going to get on beautifully; but you do not understand my girls.”

“I understand both of these I have shut up——”

“Thank goodness there is a master-key to all the doors right here on my ring,” interrupted Mrs. Pangborn, shaking the jingling bunch of keys. “In a moment—as soon as my feet are warm—we will go and let those poor girls out and send them to bed.”

“Mrs. Pangborn! you evidently do not consider the serious nature of the offense,” cried Miss Olaine, again wringing her bony hands, her eyes flashing.

“No. True. I did not ask you. What happened?”

Miss Olaine told her story—all about the pigs, and her fright, and Dorothy being disobedient, and defying her, as Miss Olaine said. But she neglected to call either culprit by name.

“I did not expect insurrection to begin so quickly, Miss Olaine,” said the principal, gravely. “And I gather from your statement that two of my girls—— They belong to the upper class, you say?”

“Yes, Mrs. Pangborn. Young ladies old enough——”

“And their names?”

“Misses Travers and Dale.”

“Tavia Travers!” gasped the older lady. “Of course! Who else would have invented such a perfectly ridiculous thing as introducing pigs into the school room?”

“I knew you would be amazed, madam.”

“Not at all,” the principal hastened to say. “Nothing Tavia ever does surprises me. But the other—not Dorothy Dale?”

“Yes, Miss Dale.”

“Oh, Miss Olaine! there must be some mistake there. I know Dorothy so well,” said Mrs. Pangborn, gravely. “The two are always together; but I am sure that whatever Dorothy told you was true. And Tavia, too, for that matter.”

“I am positive they were endeavoring to mislead me. And they would not tell who had helped them, or who else was in the plot to put those pigs in this house——”

“Miss Olaine!” gasped Mrs. Pangborn, suddenly. “That is something I forgot to speak of when I went away in such a hurry the day after you came to Glenwood.”

“What is that?” asked the surprised assistant.

“I never ask one of my girls to tell on another. They are all on honor, here. I do not expect any girl to play the spy. Indeed, I punish severely only those who show such a tendency. You were wrong to expect either of those girls to give any information which might lead to trouble for their schoolmates. Whereas, if they say nobody else was aware of the prank——”

“Miss Travers refuses to admit that she had any help at all.”

“If she says it is her own performance, you may believe it is so.”

“Oh, I do not believe in giving such latitude to mere school girls,” declared Miss Olaine, and now she was quite heated again.

Mrs. Pangborn looked at her seriously. “You have much to learn yet, I fear, Miss Olaine,” she said, quietly. “Reports of your erudition and management of studies in a great public school urged me to engage you as my assistant; but you must be guided by me in the management of my girls—that is sure.

“You might have known that shutting a girl like Tavia Travers into that little room would be no real punishment. She would merely put on her thinking cap and endeavor to bring about something that would make you look the more ridiculous.”

“Mrs. Pangborn!”

“Yes. And she has succeeded in doing so; hasn’t she?”

“How would you have had me punish her?” demanded Miss Olaine, reddening under the principal’s rather stern eye.

“Oh, that is another matter!” and the older woman laughed. “A punishment to fit the crime is rather difficult to invent in Tavia’s case. I believe I should have demanded from her an exhaustive composition upon swine, from the earliest mention of the beast in history, down through all the ages to and including the packing-house age. I would have made Tavia industrious, and perhaps taught her something.

“As for Dorothy—— Well, you have quite mistaken her character, Miss Olaine. She is the soul of truth, and while she may have been loyal to her friend, that should not be considered a crime; should it?

“Let us go now and interview the culprits. And, if you agree, I think they have both had punishment enough. Suppose you tell them to go to their room and that they will not be expected to appear at prayers or breakfast to-morrow morning. I do not approve of my girls losing their beauty sleep.”

And that is why Dorothy and Tavia got out of their difficulty so easily. They didn’t understand it—just then. But Dorothy suspected and she knew that Mrs. Pangborn was far too wise to give them an opportunity to openly face Miss Olaine and have judgment rendered accordingly.

“But I dislike her just the same,” whispered Dorothy.

“Of course we do! And she’ll try to catch us again——”

“Then behave, Tavia. The whole trouble started with your trying to plague her,” declared her friend.

“Well! I—like—that,” murmured Tavia in a tone that showed she did not like it, at all. “Just you wait, Doro. We haven’t heard the last of this. Old Olaine will just be waiting for half a chance to pounce on us again.”

Dorothy did not get at what she was looking for in the directory until the afternoon of the next day. Then she was very careful to ask permission to go to the office for reference.

She found the name and address of the secretary of the bridge builders’ union, and she wrote that afternoon asking about Tom Moran. She explained just why she wanted to learn about him, and his whereabouts, and tried to put before the person she wrote to the pitiful history of Celia Moran in a way that might engage his interest.

Dorothy had told nobody about Celia—not even Tavia. Of course her chum would have been interested in the child from the “Findling” and her lost brother. But just now—at the beginning of the term—there really was so much going on at Glenwood that aside from the hours that they spent in their imprisonment, the two friends had very little time to talk together.

This last half-year at Glenwood was bound to be a very busy one. Some studies in which Dorothy was proficient Tavia did not stand so well in, and vice versa. They had to study very hard, and when Tavia “broke out” as she was bound to do every little while, it seemed absolutely necessary that she “let off steam.”

Mrs. Pangborn understood, and so did the older teachers. But Miss Olaine was naturally a martinet, and she was very nervous and irritable in the bargain. She could not overlook the least exuberance of schoolgirl enthusiasm.

So, inside of a week, Tavia was “conditioned.” Each black mark that she had against her in deportment had to be “worked off” before the end of the half, or she could not graduate.

And in seeking to shield her chum again from the consequences of her folly, Dorothy found herself conditioned, too. Mrs. Pangborn demanded her presence in the office, and for almost the first time in her career at Glenwood, Dorothy Dale found herself at odds with the kind principal of the school.

“I am sure I have been here long enough for you to know me quite well, Mrs. Pangborn,” she said, with some heat, to the good lady who loved her. “Have I changed so much, do you think? Nobody else reports me but Miss Olaine——”

“You are changing every day, my dear. We all are,” said the principal, firmly. “But I do not believe your heart has changed, Dorothy Dale. Unfortunately Miss Olaine’s manner made all you older girls dislike her at the start. But have you stopped to think that perhaps there is something in her life—some trouble, perhaps—that makes her nervous and excitable?”

“Well—but—we——”

“You have never before been uncharitable,” smiled Mrs. Pangborn. “Try and bear patiently with Miss Olaine. If you knew all about her you would pity her condition, I am sure. No! I cannot tell you. It is not my secret, my dear. But try to understand her better—and do, Dorothy, keep Tavia within bounds!”

The principal knew that this line of pleading would win over Dorothy Dale every time!

CHAPTER IX
AN EXPEDITION AFOOT

“Yes,” said Miss Olaine, who became deeply interested when she thought she had the attention of her class, and the matter under discussion was one that appealed particularly to herself. “What we want in literature is direct and simple English.

“I wish you young ladies to mark this: Epigrams, or flowers of rhetoric, or so-called ‘fine writing,’ does not mark scholarship. The better understanding one has of words and their meanings, the more simply thought may be expressed.

“Do you attend me?” she added, sharply, staring straight at Tavia. “Then to-morrow each of you bring me, expressed in her own language upon paper, her consideration of what simple English means.”

And Tavia received another “condition” for presenting and reading aloud to the class, as requested, the following:

“Those conglomerated effusions of vapid intellects, which posed in lamented attitudes as the emotional and intellectual ingredients of fictional realism, fall far short of the obvious requirements of contemporary demands and violate the traditional models of the transcendent minds of the Elizabethan era of glorious memory.”

“You consider yourself very smart, I have no doubt, Miss Travers,” said Miss Olaine, sneeringly, “in inventing a specimen of so-called English exactly opposed to the simple language I demanded. You evidently consider that you have been sent here to school to play. We will see what a little extra work will do for you.”

And so Tavia had certain tasks to perform that kept her indoors on the next Saturday half-holiday. That is why Dorothy chanced to set out alone from the school for a long walk.

It was a cold afternoon, and the sun was hidden. There seemed to be a haze over the whole sky. But there was no snow on the ground, and the latter was as hard as iron and rang under her feet.

Jack Frost had fettered the ponds and streams and frozen the earth, in preparation for the snow that was coming. But Dorothy, not being very weatherwise, did not guess what the atmospheric conditions foretold.

It seemed to her to be a very delightful day for walking, for there was no rough wind, and the paths were so hard. She was only sorry that Tavia was not with her.

It was the apparent peacefulness of the day that tempted her off the highroad into a piece of wood with which she was not very familiar. Indeed, she would better have turned back toward the school at the time she entered the wood, for she had then come a long way.

The path she finally struck into was narrow and winding, and the trees loomed thickly on either hand. Before she realized her position, it was growing dusk and fine snow was sifting down upon her—from the thick branches of the trees, she thought at first.

“But no! that can’t be,” urged Dorothy, suddenly, and aloud. “There hasn’t been any snow for a week, and surely that which fell last would not have lain upon the branches so long. I declare! it’s a storm started. I must get back to Glenwood.”

She turned square around—she was positive she did so—and supposedly took the back track. But there were intersecting paths, and all she could see of the sky overhead was a gray blotch of cloud, out of which the snow sifted faster and faster. She had no idea of the points of the compass.

She went on, and on. “I really must get out of this and reach the road,” Dorothy told herself. “Otherwise I shall be drifting about the woods all night—and it’s altogether too cold to even contemplate that as a possibility.”

Being cheerful, however, did not culminate in Dorothy’s finding the end of the path at once. And when she did so—coming suddenly out into an open place which she did not recognize—the fine snow was driving down so fast that it almost blinded her.

“This is not the road,” thought the girl, with the first shiver of fear that she had felt. “I have got turned about. I shall have to ask——”

Whom? Through the snow she could see no house—no building of any kind. She stood and listened for several moments, straining her ears to catch the faintest sound above the swish of the driving snow.

There was no other sound. The wind seemed to be rising, and the snow had already gathered to the depth of several inches while she had been rambling in the woods.

“Really,” thought Dorothy. “I never saw snow gather so fast before.”

She had little trouble at first following the path on the edge of the wood. She knew very well it was not the highway; but it must lead somewhere—and to somewhere she must very quickly make her way!

“If I don’t want to be snowed under completely—be a regular lost ‘babe in the wood’—I must arrive at some place very soon!” was her decision.

The path was a cart track. There was a half-covered worm-fence on one hand and the edge of the wood on the other. She had no idea whether she was traveling in the direction of Glenwood Hall, or exactly the opposite way.

“Swish! swish! swish!” hissed the snow. It had a sort of soothing sound; but the fact that she was lost in it was not a soothing idea at all to Dorothy.

She staggered on, stumbling in the frozen path, and realizing very keenly that the snow was gathering no faster than the cold was increasing. With the dropping of night the temperature was sliding downward with great rapidity.

Dorothy Dale was in real peril. The driving snow blinded her; she lost the line of the fence finally, and knew that she was staggering through an open field. She was still in the winding cart-path, for she fell into and out of the ruts continually; but she was traveling across an open farm. The sheltering wood was behind her and the snow drove down upon her, harder than before.

She halted, her back to the increasing wind, and tried to peer ahead. A wall of drifting snow limited the view. She raised her voice and shouted—again and again!

There came no reply. Not even a dog barked. She seemed alone in a world of drifting snow, and now she was really terrified.

She was benumbed by the cold and it would be impossible for her to travel much farther. If she did not reach some refuge soon——

Dorothy plunged on into the storm, scrambling over the rough path, and occasionally raising her voice in cries for help. But she was so breathless and spent that she traveled slowly.

Here was a fence corner. The way was open into a narrow lane. Several huge oak trees in a row bulked big before her as she pressed on. She could not remember ever having seen the spot before.

But Dorothy believed a house must be near. Surely she would not be lost—covered up by the snow and frozen to death—near to a human habitation?

“There must be somebody living around here!” she murmured, plowing on through the drifts. “Help; help!”

Her faint cry brought no response. She was becoming confused as well as weary. The wind increased in force so rapidly that when she again halted and leaned back against it, it seemed to the weakened girl as though she were lying in somebody’s arms!

The snow swept around her like a mantle. It gathered deeply at her feet. She no longer felt the keen air, but was sinking into a pleasant lethargy.

There was peril in this, and at another time Dorothy would have understood it fully. But she was not now in a state to understand what threatened her. She was only drowsy—weak—almost insensible. Another moment and she would have fallen in the snow and sunk into that sleep from which there would be no awakening.

And then, to her dim eyes, appeared a sudden glow of lamplight ahead. It could not be far away, for she heard the hinges of a door creak, and then a voice reached her ears:

“Come in here! What are you doing out in that snow—ye good-for-nothin’? Ain’t ye got no sinse, I wanter know? Av all the young ’uns that iver was bawn, it’s you is the wust av th’ lot. Come in here!”

Dorothy was aroused by these words. For a moment she thought the woman who spoke must be addressing her. Then she heard a thin little voice answer:

“Oh, Mrs. Hogan! I know I heard somebody hollerin’ in the snow. It’s somebody what’s lost, Mrs. Hogan.”

“Nonsinse! Come away, now—I’ll have no more av yer foolin’, Cely Moran. I’ll sind ye ter bed widout yer supper if ye don’t come in out o’ that snow——”

Dorothy hardly understood yet; but almost involuntarily she raised her voice in a cry of:

“Celia! Celia Moran!”

SHE STAGGERED FORWARD INTO THE DIM RADIANCE OF THE LIGHT. Dorothy Dale’s Promise. Page [77].

“Do you hear that, Mrs. Hogan?” shrieked the shrill voice of the child.

“Bless us an’ save us!” gasped the woman. “The saints preserve us! ’Tis a ghost, it is.”

“What’s a ghost, Mrs. Hogan?” demanded the inquisitive Celia, quick to seize upon a new word.

“’Tis a Pixie. Who knows yer name in this place? Come away, child!”

Dorothy, who heard them plainly now, cried out again. She staggered forward into the dim radiance of the light that shone from the farmhouse kitchen.

“There she is!” Dorothy heard the little one say. Then she plunged forward to her knees. Mrs. Ann Hogan, the grenadier, came flying out of the doorway and gathered Dorothy right up in her strong arms.

“Git out from under fut, ye nuisance!” she commanded, speaking to Celia. “Av coorse ’tis somebody in trouble. Make way, there! Lemme near the stove wid her.

“Sure, ’tis a most be-uchiful young leddy as ever was. An’ she was lost in the snow—thrue for yez! Sure her folks will be payin’ well for her bein’ saved from death this night.

“Shut the door, Cely. Put on the kettle—she must have somethin’ hot. Stir yer stumps, Cely Moran, or I’ll be the death of ye!”

CHAPTER X
AT THE CASTLE OF THE OGRESS

There was a buzzing in Dorothy’s ears; it seemed as though she could not be herself, but must be somebody else. “Herself” was still out in that dreadful snowstorm—sinking to a fatal sleep in the soft drifts.

Yet all the time she heard—distantly, but sufficiently distinct—the clatter of Mrs. Ann Hogan’s tongue, and the gasping, interrupted speech of little Celia Moran. At first Dorothy thought her rescue must be a dream.

“Take off her shoes—do ye hear me, ye little nuisance?” commanded the big woman. “Sure, ’tis jest about done for, she is. Cely! Cely Moran! did ye bring the eggs as I told ye?”

“Oh, dear, me, Mrs. Hogan,” said the little girl. “I was that scared——”

“Thim eggs!” exclaimed the woman. “Where be they?”

“I dropped the basket when I heard the lady holler——”

“Go for thim! They’ll be froze in another minnit—an’ eggs fawty-two cints th’ dozen at the store! Mind, now! if ye’ve broke thim, I’ll wallop ye.”

Dorothy knew that the door was opened again, for a blast of cold wind came in. But she could not open her eyes. The lids were too heavy. Mrs. Hogan was rubbing her hand’s between her own—which were as rough as nutmeg graters!

“Here ye are,” declared the woman, still kneeling before the settee on which she had laid Dorothy. She spoke to the child. “Are they broke, I ax ye?”

“No, ma’am! No, ma’am, Mrs. Hogan,” stuttered Celia’s shrill little voice. “Oh, I didn’t break none; but the hulls come off two or three——”

“Little nuisance!” snapped the woman. “And ye’d lie about it, too. Put ’em careful on the shelf—or I’ll be the death of ye! Lit another egg be broken——”

The unfinished threat seemed to fill the child with terror. Dorothy heard her sobbing softly. Then she crept to Dorothy’s feet again and continued to unlace the bigger girl’s shoes. When they were drawn off Mrs. Hogan began to rub the girl’s feet. They were so cold and stiff that it seemed to Dorothy as though they would be broken right off in the woman’s hard hands.

She forced her eyes open, and saw the big woman on her knees. Celia’s wondering little face was close to her own. Dorothy sat up with sudden energy.

“Oh! oh! oh!” whispered Celia. “It is my dear, dear young lady!”

“Why, Celia——”

“Is it knowin’ aich other ye bes?” demanded Mrs. Hogan, suspiciously. Dorothy was half afraid of this muscular Amazon. She thought it best to tell the whole truth.

“I saw Celia in the Belding station the day you brought her home from the city foundling asylum, Mrs. Hogan,” she said, simply.

“Arrah! the little baggage!” grumbled the woman. “An’ she niver said a wor-r-rd about it—bad ’cess to her!”

“I expect she was afraid you would not like it,” observed Dorothy, quietly. “It was not Celia’s fault. I spoke to her myself. No, Mrs. Hogan! never mind rubbing my feet any more. Thank you. They will be quite warm in a minute.”

Somehow she did not want the great, coarse woman to touch her.

“Well, now,” said Mrs. Hogan, rising to her feet, and standing with her hands on her hips and her arms akimbo, “well, now, will ye be tellin’ me where ye come from, young leddy?”

“From Glenwood Hall school. I am Dorothy Dale.”

“Indade! And do they know where ye be?”

“Why, I didn’t know myself where I was until I heard Celia’s voice,” declared Dorothy. “She told me she was going to live with you. But—but I don’t really know the situation of this farm, Mrs. Hogan. You see, I got lost in the woods, and in the storm. It came on to snow so fast and so suddenly.”

“Yis—I see,” grunted Mrs. Hogan. “I kin tell ye how far ye air from the highway. ’Tis eight mile, if it’s a step.”

“Oh, dear! I must have been wandering farther and farther away from the highway all the time.”

“Thrue for ye! Well, ye want to retur-r-rn, I make no doubt—as soon as ye can?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the girl, quickly. “I am getting nice and warm. It was silly of me to almost lose consciousness——”

“In a short time ye’d been dead in the snow,” declared the woman, bluntly. “And ye can thank yer stars I found ye. Yis, indeed. Yer friends will doubtless thank me, too,” and she spoke grimly.

Dorothy was remembering more clearly now. She had heard the woman say something about being paid for taking care of her—she could easily believe that Mrs. Hogan would do no kindness save through a mercenary motive.

“Do you suppose I can get back to school to-night, Mrs. Hogan?” she asked, rather timidly.

“And in this stor-r-rm, is it?”

“But Mrs. Pangborn will be worried.”

“Who’s she—the head teacher, is it? Well! Now, do yez think yez could find yer way alone, Miss?”

“Oh, I am afraid not,” admitted Dorothy, looking at the snow banking against the windows of the farmhouse kitchen.

“Nor ye couldn’t walk it, not even if I went with ye?”

“Oh, Mrs. Hogan! You wouldn’t attempt such a thing?”

The grenadier shook herself. She was more than six feet tall, and her shoulders were wide and her arms long. She was really a giantess.

“Sure, I’ve tackled har-r-rder jobs,” she said. “But mebbe I kin get Jim Bentley to put the hosses t’ th’ pung. But ye’ll pay for thim?”

“I’d gladly pay what you ask——”

“Tin dollars, then,” said the woman, quickly. “’Tis wuth it, to take ye home through the snow this night.”

“I—I’ll pay it, Mrs. Hogan,” said Dorothy, faintly. “At least, Mrs. Pangborn will pay it. I haven’t the money.”

“Well! I’ll see Jim—Is he out to the stables, Cely?”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied the child, who had been gazing at Dorothy all this time with wide open eyes. “But one of the hosses is down, ma’am.”

“What’s that? What’s that ye tell me?” exclaimed the woman, turning on Celia, angrily. “Down in the stall, ye mane?”

“Yes, ma’am. I saw it. And Mr. Bentley, he was sayin’ nawful things about it——”

“Sayin’ what?” demanded Mrs. Hogan.

“He was swearin’ jes’ awful,” pursued the little girl, in an awed whisper.

“Swearin’; was he? What do ye know about swearin’, plague o’ me life?” said the woman. “Till me what he said?”

“Oh, Mrs. Hogan! I couldn’t,” gasped Celia, shaking her head. “It—it’s wicked to swear.”

“You tell me——”

“I couldn’t,” repeated Celia. “But you say over all of the very baddest cuss words you know, Mrs. Hogan, and I’ll tell you when you come to ’em—jes’ what Mr. Bentley said.”

Dorothy suddenly wanted to laugh, although she was half frightened still of the ogress. Mrs. Hogan raised her hand as though to box the little girl’s ears; but then she thought better of it.

“Can ye bate that, Miss?” she demanded of Dorothy. “’Tis allus the way. The young ’un is as smart as a steel trap. ’Tis the way she be allus gittin’ the best of me.

“Well, now! ’tis not to the school ye’ll get this night, then. Ye can see that?”

“Oh, Mrs. Hogan!”

“And the stor-r-rm is bad, too. Aven with two hosses we might not win through aisy. And with only wan—Arrah! ye’ll haf ter stay the night out, Miss. I s’pose ye’ll willin’ly pay for it?”

“I am sure, Mrs. Hogan,” Dorothy said, “you will lose nothing by giving me shelter.”

“I dunno. Rich folks ain’t as lib’ral as they might be. And ye’d never cra’led—not on yer han’s an’ knees—to the next neighbor. Mind that, now!”

“I am quite sure,” said Dorothy, humbly, “that I should have fallen in the snow had not your house been near.”

“Well! I’ll make ye somehow comferble. Till marnin’ anyhow. Thin we’ll see. If it kapes on snowin’ like this, though, Miss, ’twill be a blizzard an’ no knowin’ when ye’ll git back to that school.”

“If only Mrs. Pangborn—and Tavia—and all the others—won’t be scared about me,” murmured Dorothy.

“They’ll be sure ye warn’t fule enough to go on, and on, when it began ter snow so,” grunted the woman. “’Tis lucky our frinds think better av our sinse than we desarve. They’ll be sure ye wint into some house when it began to storm so hard, me gur-r-rl.”

Meanwhile Dorothy had removed her hat and coat and Mrs. Hogan hung them to dry behind the big cookstove which set well out from the chimney-piece. She advised her guest to sit up to the stove and dry the bottom of her skirt, while she herself got into a man’s storm-coat and gloves, lit a lantern, and sallied forth, as she said, “to see what that ormadoun, Jim Bentley, was doing to the hoss.”

The moment she was gone Celia ran into Dorothy’s open arms. The child clung around the neck of Dorothy, and whispered:

“Don’t you be afraid, lady. She won’t hurt you.”

“Does she hurt you, Celia?” demanded the older girl. “Does she whip you?”

“Oh, no! Not unless I’m real bad. But—but she doesn’t like little girls—not a little, teeny bit. I—I wisht I lived with somebody that liked little girls, lady.”

“Don’t call me that, dear,” said Dorothy, hastily, and wiping away her tears. The little one was dry-eyed as she had been that day in the railroad station. “My name is Dorothy—Dorothy Dale. Can you remember that?”

“Oh, yes! It’s so pretty,” said Celia, smiling up at her wistfully. “And please, can I ask you a question, Dorothy Dale—please?”

“All you want to, dear,” cried her friend.

“Oh!” cried Celia, clasping her little, clawlike hands, “have you found Tom Moran yet? Have you found my brother?”

CHAPTER XI
SNOWBOUND

The earnestness in the little, shrewd face, the quaver of her voice, the clutch of her fingers around Dorothy’s neck, all impressed the girl from Glenwood Hall as to just how much the finding of the big, lost brother meant to little Celia Moran.

“I haven’t found him yet, dear,” she said, brokenly. “But I will—I will—find him. I have written a letter, and I am going to keep on searching—Oh, my dear! I know I shall find him for you in the end. Just you have patience.”

“That’s what the matron used to say at the Findling,” said Celia. “But, do you know patience is a nawful hard thing to keep?”

“I expect it is, dear.”

“And you’ll be sure to find the right Tom Moran,” urged the little girl. “You know, he’s big, and he’s got ever so red hair, and he builds bridges and things.”

“I shall find the right one,” promised Dorothy.

“You see, Mrs. Hogan don’t want me to talk about him,” said the child, faintly. “When I forgets and does, she says: ‘Drat the young ’un! Ain’t she thankful for havin’ a home?’

“But, do you know,” pursued Celia, her voice dropping to a whisper again, “I’se afraid I ain’t as thankful as I doughter be—no, I ain’t.”

“Not thankful?”

“No, ma’am! I can’t somehow jes’ feel thankful for Mrs. Ann Hogan.”

Dorothy could not blame her for this, but she did not feel it right to agree with her. “Oh, my dear! I expect Mrs. Hogan is kind to you—in her way,” she said.

“Yes, I ’spect so,” sighed Celia, nodding slowly. “But you can’t jes’ get uster some folkses’ ways; can you? It—it was better in the Findling—yes, it was, Dorothy. And I hoped if any lady took me away it would be a nice, cuddly one.”

“A cuddly one?” repeated Dorothy. “What sort of a lady is that?”

“Why, you know,” Celia said, with eagerness. “The kind that cuddles you, and makes a-much over you. Of course, you never was a Findling, Dorothy?”

“Oh, no, dear! I haven’t any mother, any more than you have; but I have a dear, dear father and two brothers——”

“Well, you see,” interrupted the eager little one, “some of the ladies what come for the findlings just fall right in love with them. The matron lady always dresses ’em up real pretty, and curls their hair, and makes ’em look as pretty as they can look.

“You see,” she added, in an explanatory way, “I was so nawful thin—scrawny, the matron said—the mother-ladies what comed to find a findling didn’t care much for me.”

Dorothy could understand that it was the pretty, plump children who would mostly attract those lonely hearts reaching out for the babies that God had denied them.

“You see,” pursued Celia, “Mrs. Hogan wanted a young one that could work. She told the matron so. I was gettin’ so big that they had to let somebody have me pretty soon, or I’d have to go to the Girls’ School—an’ the matron said ‘God forbid!’ so I guess the Girls’ School ain’t a very nice place for little girls to go,” and Celia shook her head wisely.

“But, you see, I hoped an’ hoped that one of the cuddly ladies would take me. I seen one carry Maisie—she was my little friend—right out of the Findling, and down the steps, and into a great, big, be-youtiful ortermobile. She hugged her tight all the way, too, an’ I think—she cried over her. The matron said she’d lost a little girl that looked like Maisie.

“But I didn’t look like nobody that was lost—not at all. They all said when they looked at me: ‘She’s jes’ the cutest little thing!’ But somehow they didn’t love me.”

“Oh, my dear!” cried Dorothy, gathering Celia into her arms again. “I don’t see why all the lonesome mothers that came there to the asylum didn’t fall in love with you right away!”

There was a great stamping upon the porch and the door flew open. Dorothy saw that the whole world outside seemed to be one vast snowbank. Mrs. Hogan, puffing and blowing, in knee boots and her man’s outfit, was covered with snow.

“That Jim Bentley’s gone home—bad ’cess t’ him. Though ’tis me saves a supper thereby. An’ he niver got the hoss up at all, at all!” she cried, wiping her red face on a towel hanging by the sink, and then shedding her outside garments, boots and all, in a heap by the hot stove.

“’Tis an awful night out,” she pursued. “’Tis lucky ye came here as ye did, Miss. We’re safe and sound, the saints be praised! An’ I got the ould hoss on his feet, mesilf, an’ no thanks to that lazy spalpane, Jim Bentley. The Lord is good to the poor Irish.”

Dorothy decided that the man, Jim Bentley, must be a neighbor whom Mrs. Hogan hired to do some of her heavy work. But the Amazon seemed quite capable of doing a good deal of farm work herself.

Now she set about getting supper, and she kept Celia Moran hopping to run her errands, fetch and carry, and otherwise aid in the preparation of the meal. It was no banquet; merely hot bread and fried pork, with some preserves, the latter evidently opened for the delectation of the “paying guest.”

Mrs. Hogan made it plain at every turn that she expected to be paid for everything she did for Dorothy. She was a veritable female miser. Dorothy had never imagined such a person in all her life before.

And, although the woman did not really put her hand upon little Celia, she was continually threatening her and hustling her about. She seemed even to begrudge the poor child her food, and the infinitesimal portion of preserve that was put upon Celia’s plate was, to Dorothy’s mind, “the last straw.”

The school girl boldly changed saucers with Celia and gave the little one her share of the sweetmeat.

Mrs. Hogan would not let her guest assist in clearing up after supper. Celia, in a long apron tied around her throat by its strings, and dragging on the floor so that her little feet in their worn shoes were impeded when she tried to walk, stood upon a box at the kitchen sink and washed the pile of dishes, while her mistress dried them—scolding and admonishing all the time.

“Av all the young imps of Satan! looker that now! D’ye not know tis wrong ter wash the greasy dishes first? How often must I tell ye? An’ her water’s not hot.

“That’s it! pour in some more. ’Tis too hot for ye? ’Twill cool. An’ yer han’s no bether nor mine, an’ w’en I was your age I washed dishes for a boardin’ house—twinty hear-r-rty men sat doon to the table, too. And they made a wash-basket o’ dishes iv’ry male, so they did!

“What’s the mather with yer han’s? Is ut a cute lady ye expict ter be? Ha! ye’ll l’arn some practical things, then, while yer wid me. Arrah! there’s a plate that ain’t clane. What d’ye mane by ut? ’Tis a good lickin’ ye oughter have!”

And thus she went on all during the task. Poor Celia was not struck, or really abused, as far as Dorothy could see. But she was sensitive, and the lashing of Mrs. Hogan’s coarse tongue hurt Celia more than physical punishment would have hurt some other child.

When the smoke of battle had passed away, and little Celia had washed out and hung up the dish-towels to dry on the line behind the stove, Dorothy took her on the settee beside her. Mrs. Hogan made no objection, nor did she scarcely speak to them as the evening advanced.

Dorothy whispered stories to the round-eyed child—Oh! she had had plenty of practise in story-telling while her brothers, Joe and Roger, were little. Celia was too old to care much for “The Little Rid Hin”, or “The Frog He Would A-Wooing Go”; but Dorothy could repeat “Aspinax; or, the Enchanted Dwarf” almost word for word, and the marvellous adventures of that appealing hero held Celia’s enthralled attention for the evening.

Perhaps Mrs. Hogan had been listening, too; for she never said a word about its being bedtime until the story was finished. All the time the snow had been beating against the house, while the wind moaned in the chimney and occasionally rattled a loose shutter.

It was really an awful night out, and Dorothy felt that she was being snowbound here in this lonely farmhouse. She was only afraid that Tavia and the other girls, as well as Mrs. Pangborn, would be frightened for her.

“I’ll be puttin’ youse in the spare room. ’Tis a betther bed than those above stairs,” said Mrs. Hogan. “I suppose ye’ll be willin’ to pay a mite extry for th’ accommidation? There’s a stove and a fire laid ready to light. Ye kin undress where ’tis war-r-rm, and I’ll heat the sheets for ye. In the marnin’ I’ll sind Celia down airly, an’ she kin light the fire for ye, Miss Dale. ’Tis goin’ to be a cold night, an’ we may be snowed ter th’ eaves by marnin.”

“Oh! I hope not,” replied Dorothy, warmly.

“Ye nade have no fear. There’s plenty of fuel and atein’, I’d have ye know.”

“But are you going to let me sleep down here all alone?” queried Dorothy.

“Sure, the upstairs rooms are not fit for the likes o’ ye,” said the woman, quickly. “And there’s no manes of heatin’ them. In the marnin’ ye’ll have a nice, hot fire to git up by. I’ll see that Cely lights it——”

“Oh, Mrs. Hogan!” cried Dorothy, “let Celia sleep down here with me. Your bed is big enough for two, surely.”

“Well, I dunno——”

“Then she will be right on hand to light the fire in the morning,” suggested Dorothy, who could not think calmly of the little girl getting up in the cold to come downstairs and light a fire for her. “And I’d love to have her sleep with me. She’d be company.”

“Well, if ye wish it,” said the woman, slowly. “But mind ye, Cely! if ye’re not a good gur-rl—an’ kick an’ thrash in yer sleep—I’ll certainly spank ye. Now, mind that!”

The woman got up and went through the hall to open the guest chamber. The room was like a refrigerator, and the cold air swept out of it into the kitchen and made Dorothy and Celia “hug the stove.” It was a bitter cold night and Dorothy secretly longed for her own warm room, with Tavia, at Glenwood Hall.

But Celia was delighted at the permission given her. She wriggled out of Dorothy’s arms and ran upstairs for her nightie. Mrs. Hogan brought forth one of her own sleeping garments for Dorothy—voluminous enough, it seemed to the girl, to be used as a tent if one wished to go camping out.

The nightgown was of coarse muslin, but as white as it could be, and had evidently been folded away in lavender for some special occasion. Mrs. Hogan did not give one the impression of being a lady who paid much attention to the niceties of life.

And there was Celia’s little nightie—a coarse, unbleached cotton garment, with not even a frill of common lace about the throat. When the child got into it and knelt by the kitchen settee to say her prayers, Dorothy thought she looked as though she was dressed in a little meal-sack!

Meanwhile Mrs. Hogan had brought down an old-fashioned brass “bed warmer” from the wall—a long handle, covered pan (the cover being perforated) into which she shoveled some glowing coals from the stove fire-box. With this bed-warmer she ironed the bed in the guest room. These bed-warmers were common enough in the pioneer homes of New England and the upper New York counties, and Dorothy decided that Mrs. Hogan must have found this one in the old farmhouse when she had purchased the place.

“Come on wid ye, now!” the woman called from the cold bed chamber. “Oi’ve taken the desp’rit cold out o’ the shates, and’ yez kin cuddle in here an’ kape war-r-rm. But ye’ll git no sich notion in yer head that I’ll be warmin’ yer bid for yez on other nights, Cely; for I won’t do ut! I never have me own bed warmed, and it’s well fer youse ter l’arn ter live harsh, too.”

This was her good-night to them. When the two girls had scrambled into bed, all of a shiver from crossing the cold hall and the big chamber, Mrs. Hogan banged the door, and the next moment they heard her fixing the kitchen fire for the night.

Dorothy had gathered the little, starved body of Celia in her arms. The little one sighed, sobbed, and then lay still. Before Dorothy had realized it, Celia was fast asleep—so wearied was the little one.

But the older girl lay, broad awake, for some minutes. Her breath puffed out in plainly visible mist, the air of the room was so cold. The freezing water in the pitcher on the washstand snapped and crackled. A shade had been raised to the top of the sash, and that ghostly light always present when it is snowing at night, faintly illuminated the bare room.

“Swish! swish! swish!” the snow beat upon the clapboards outside. She saw that the lower sash was completely covered by the snow. The drifts were piling up on this side of the house, and Dorothy finally dropped to sleep, hugging her little charge, with the feeling that she was being buried alive beneath the soft, white mantle.

CHAPTER XII
TAVIA IS MYSTIFIED

Tavia, among other things, had a long Latin verse to translate. This was one of the “extras,” or “conditions” heaped upon the already burdened shoulders of the irrepressible.

“But if Olaine wasn’t such a mean, mean thing she wouldn’t have given me all those black marks—so’t I couldn’t go with Dorothy on her walk,” Tavia said to some of the other girls who looked in on her that Saturday afternoon.

From which it may clearly be drawn that Tavia was one of those persons who desire “to eat their cake and have it, too!” She had had her fun, in breaking the school rules; but she did not like to pay for the privilege.

“I wouldn’t mind if it was mathematics,” wailed Tavia, when Ned Ebony and Cologne came in to condole with her. “But this beastly old Latin——”

“Oh, dear me! that reminds me,” said the slow-going Cologne. “I hate mathematics. There used to be a problem in the arithmetic about how much water goes over Niagara Falls in a given time——”

“Pooh!” interrupted Tavia, “I can tell you off-hand how much water goes over Niagara Falls to a quart.”

“Oh, Tavia! you can’t,” gasped Cologne, her eyes big with awe.

“That’s easy. Two pints,” chuckled Tavia, and Cologne was for some time studying out the answer!

“If you’d only learned to be ambidextrous in your youth, Tavia,” said Edna Black, smiling. “Then you could write out that Latin with one hand and do sums with the other—and so get over your old ‘conditions’ quicker and come and have some fun.”

“Ha! that’s what Mrs. Pangborn said yesterday,” interposed Cologne, coming out of her brown study. “She said that with just a little practise we should find it just as easy to do anything with one hand as with the other.”

Tavia looked up from her paper again, and giggled. “Wish I’d heard her,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’d asked her how she supposed a boy would ever learn to put his left hand in the right hand pocket of his trousers. Wouldn’t that have stumped even Mrs. Pangborn?”

“And it might have won you another black mark. That fatal sense of humor of yours will get you into deep water yet,” said Cologne, wagging her head.

“Oh, go on out and play—both of you!” cried Tavia. “I couldn’t go with Dorothy, and I’ll never get this done if you don’t leave me alone. Miss Olaine said I must do it before supper time.”

“You’d better hurry, then,” declared Ned.

“That’s right,” said Rose-Mary. “It’s getting dark now—and oh! it’s beginning to snow.”

It was snowing hard when Tavia went down to the office to deliver her papers into the strict Miss Olaine’s hands. The mail bag had just come in and the teacher was distributing the letters and cards into the pigeon-holes which served the school for letter boxes. Each member of the senior class had her own little box.

Tavia knew better than to interrupt Miss Olaine at her present task. The whole school had learned by now that the new assistant was not to be trifled with. Miss Olaine was as severe as though she were a prison warden instead of a school teacher.

Idly Tavia watched the distribution of the mail. She saw a fat letter put into her own pigeon-hole and knew it was from her brother Johnny. Dorothy’s box was right next to it. Already there were several letters lying in it, for her correspondence was large.

Then Tavia saw Miss Olaine hesitate with a postal card in her hand. The teacher had evidently picked it up with the message side uppermost. Something on the card caught Miss Olaine’s eye.

She gasped. Then the teacher turned white and staggered to a chair. The girl almost sprang forward to assist her; but Miss Olaine recovered her usual stern manner.

She read the card through, however—there was no doubt of that. Then she turned it over slowly and read the address.

Tavia waited.

Miss Olaine slowly recovered from her emotion—either fear or amazement, Tavia did not know which. She had evidently forgotten the girl’s presence.

She stood up again. The other letters had fallen, and were scattered on the desk. Miss Olaine held the postal card as though she contemplated tearing it in pieces.

But evidently the remembrance that Uncle Sam’s mail laws cannot be violated with impunity, held the teacher’s hand. Slowly she raised the card and placed it—in Dorothy Dale’s letter box!

“Now, whatever under the sun can that mean?” whispered Tavia to herself. “For Dorothy! And she was going to tear it up——”

“Well, Miss! what do you want?” snapped Miss Olaine, suddenly. She seemed quite to have recovered from her emotion, whatever it had been. She spoke more tartly than usual, and glared at Tavia as though the girl had no business there.

“I brought down my exercise as you told me, Miss Olaine,” said Tavia, who was not at all awed by the teacher’s grimness.

“Leave it,” was the short command.

“Can—can I have our mail?”

“You will get your mail at supper time—with the rest of the girls,” replied Miss Olaine.

“But I only thought—as long as I was here——”

“There are rules to be abided by, Miss Octavia,” said the teacher, sternly. “If you would try to remember that, you would get along better at this school,” and she showed that she expected Tavia to leave the office at once.

“My goodness!” exclaimed Tavia, under her breath, as she departed, “isn’t she the old cat? And she almost tore up Dorothy’s card! I wonder what it meant? Humph! just the same if that card doesn’t show up in Dorothy’s mail to-night, I shall tell her, and we’ll just get after old Olaine. I’d like to drive her out of the school, anyway.”

Tavia, however, forgot about Miss Olaine’s sternness—even forgot about the mystery of the postal card—when the supper bell rang and Dorothy had not returned. By that time the snow was sifting down steadily, gathering in depth each minute, and the wind had begun to sigh in the pines “like long lost spirits,” as Ned Ebony said.

“Oh, dear, me! where can she have gone?” cried Tavia.

Soon it would be pitch dark—or, as dark as it could be with the snow falling. It looked as though a white curtain had been drawn right down outside each window that Tavia looked out of. She hurried downstairs, forgetting all about mail which was now “open”, and asked to see Mrs. Pangborn.

The principal was at tea, and when Tavia burst in upon her she, being used to the girl’s exuberance of temperament, went right on eating thin strips of buttered toast and sipping tea.

“And if it is snowing hard, my dear, don’t you think that our sensible Dorothy will realize it—quite as soon as we do?” queried Mrs. Pangborn.

“But, suppose there was no house near when it began to snow?”

“Dorothy was going out the Old Mill road; wasn’t she? So you said.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And there isn’t a house on that road that is out of sight of at least two other houses,” laughed the principal of Glenwood. “Oh, my dear! Dorothy has undoubtedly been caught in the storm—and has been wise enough to take shelter until morning. Don’t worry, my dear.”

Mrs. Pangborn was so cool about it that Tavia was bound to have her anxiety quenched. Only—she did feel as though something was not altogether right with her absent friend. But Tavia went away to supper, feeling somehow relieved.

The girls of Glenwood Hall usually had a good time at this hour. As long as they did not become too hilarious, the teachers had been in the habit of overlooking a certain amount of boisterousness and display of high spirits.

That is, so it had been up to this term. But since Miss Olaine had been in the school a general drawing of the lines over all the girls had gone on until more than Tavia and her immediate friends complained of the strictness of the school discipline.

This evening Miss Olaine sat like a thundercloud at the head of the seniors’ table. Every time a girl laughed aloud the stern teacher turned her baleful glance that way.

“Something’s up!” whispered Edna to Tavia. “Never has Miss Olaine looked as grim as to-night. What have you been doing to her, Tavia?”

“Not a thing!” declared the girl addressed. But the remark set Tavia to thinking of the incident of the postal card. She hurried through her supper, was excused early, and went directly to the office for her own mail—and for Dorothy’s.

“If that card isn’t there——”

This was Tavia’s unfinished thought. She obtained Johnny’s letter and Dorothy’s packet of missives, and ran upstairs to the room. There she spread all of her chum’s letters out under the reading lamp.

There was more than one card; but Tavia knew the one Miss Olaine had read, very well. The other cards were souvenir cards; this was a regular correspondence card, addressed to “Miss Dorothy Dale, Glenwood School.” There was no mistaking it.

“Well, it’s here,” Tavia murmured, with a sigh of relief. “She didn’t make way with it. I wonder——”

She turned the card over. It was the most natural thing in the world to read the brief, typewritten message there:

“Tom Moran disappeared after the Rector St. School fire, two years ago. His Union Card has lapsed. We know nothing about his whereabouts—if he is alive.

“I. K. Tierney, Sec’y.”

“Why—isn’t that funny?” gasped Tavia. “Whoever heard the like? Yes! it’s really got Dorothy’s name on it. Sounds just as though she had asked this man, Tierney, about this other person, Tom Moran!

“I never heard of either of them. What interest can Dorothy have in them? But—hold on!” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly startled by a new thought. “What interest has Miss Olaine in the men—or in Dorothy’s inquiry, whichever it may be?”

CHAPTER XIII
TUNNELING OUT

What awoke Dorothy she could not tell. For the first few moments she lay still, realizing that there was a deadly chill in the air outside of the heavy mass of bedclothing that weighed her body down. The frosty air did not seem at all like the air of the room she occupied with Tavia at Glenwood Hall.

Then—with something of a shock—she remembered that she was not with Tavia, or at Glenwood Hall!

She felt the pressure of the warm little body of Celia, curled up like a kitten in a ball, beside her in the bed of the best room at Mrs. Hogan’s house. There was light enough in the room for her to see the grim, bare nature of the place—its ugly furniture and the plain rag carpet on the floor.

She looked at the uncurtained window and to her amazement saw that, from bottom to top, it was masked with snow. It looked as though the drift was higher than the very top of the window!

Was it still snowing, or had the storm ceased? Not a sound came from without; nor could she detect a sound within the house.

There was no clock in the room and Dorothy’s own watch was in the kitchen where she had left her clothing. She stirred about to gain an easier position, and the little body of Celia Moran uncurled.

“Oh! oh! Tom—Dorothy——”

The murmur of the child’s voice served to wake Dorothy properly. Celia was dreaming—of Dorothy herself, and of her lost brother. The older girl kissed her, laid her touseled head upon the pillow, and then crept out of the warm feathers into the cold, cold room.

There was a matchbox on the mantel behind the small sheet-iron stove. With chattering teeth the Glenwood girl reached the matches, stooped by the door of the stove, scratched the lucifer, and ignited the shavings and corncobs which made sufficient kindling in the firebox to set off the hardwood sticks piled in above the tinder.

The fire began to roar almost instantly. She darted back across the icy floor and crept again into bed. Whether it was morning, or not, Dorothy determined to have a fire and somehow kill the deadly chill of that guest room.

Celia still slept. The yellow light of the fire began to send dancing reflections upon the ceiling through the perforated draft of the stove. Dorothy lay there and listened to the fire’s roar; but there was no other sound in the house for some time.

The atmosphere of the room perceptibly changed. There was a little blue haze in the air and the smell of burning varnish, for the careful Mrs. Hogan had painted the stove to keep it from rusting and perhaps this was the first time it had been used during the winter.

By and by Dorothy heard the creak of the stair under the heavy tread of the farm woman. It must, the schoolgirl judged, be time to rise; yet the snow drift kept out the morning light.

She heard Mrs. Hogan at the kitchen stove, raking down the ashes and rattling the dampers. By and by she came through the hall and opened the door.

“Ha!” she said. “Ye have a boomin’ fire—an’ all goin’ up the chimney, av coorse. Fuel is nothin’ to the rich. Git up out o’ that, Cely Moran! D’ye wanter lie abed all day? ’Tis long past sivin o’clock, and we’re snowed in to the second story—an’ still ’tis snowin’. Git up, I say!”

Meanwhile she had partly closed the back draft and the fire roared less angrily. Celia stirred sleepily.

“Good morning!” Dorothy said to Mrs. Hogan. “I am going to get up, too. Will you put my clothes in here? It is getting nice and warm now.”

“I’ll sind thim in by Cely. Git out o’ that bed, now—plague o’ me life! Scatter out inter the kitchen,” and she drove the little one before her as one would shoo a chicken.

“It really isn’t snowing now; is it?” cried Dorothy, before Mrs. Hogan could shut the door.

“Indade it is—snowin’ hard. I kin see it from me winder upstairs. But the house is drifted around, till there’s a bank before me kitchen door higher than the lintel. And me’ kitchen pump’s froze. Lucky there’s water in the tea kettle and I’ll soon have it thawed. Ye’ll find water—or ice—in that pitcher yonder, Miss.”

The woman retreated. Celia, as soon as she had got into her own clothes, brought in Dorothy’s garments and hung them carefully on chairs about the stove to warm before the bigger girl put them on.

“You’re a dear little maid!” cried Dorothy. “Thank you.”

“I wish I could go to that school and work for you,” said Celia, wistfully. “Don’t you suppose I could?”

“I am afraid not, Celia,” returned Dorothy, yet wishing, too, that it were possible. “You try your best to please Mrs. Hogan. And meantime I’ll find your brother as quick as I can.”

Had Dorothy known what was written on that postal card from the secretary of the ironworkers’ union, which message had so puzzled her friend Tavia, she could not have spoken with the assurance she did.

Dorothy dressed hurriedly and managed to get enough of the ice in the pitcher melted, meanwhile, on the stove hearth, to enable her to make her toilet. The sting of the icy water upon her eyes and temples served to wake her up and started her pulse at a quicker beat. She ran out into the smoky kitchen, to see Celia setting the table while Mrs. Hogan fried the usual pork and johnny cakes.

“Oh, that does smell so good!” cried the girl from Glenwood School.

Mrs. Hogan smiled—and her smile was rare indeed!—when she heard this. She considered that she could safely tack on an additional quarter for breakfast in the final bill she meant to present for Dorothy’s entertainment.

“Oh, see here!” exclaimed Celia, and ran to open the door. A white wall of packed snow faced them.

“Oh, dear me! we are really snowed in,” said Dorothy. “However will we manage to dig a way out?”

“Come away from that, now, ye little plague,” spoke Mrs. Hogan to Celia. “Arrah, now! see what ye’ve done. Looker that mess of snow on the floor.”

A hodful, at least, had become detached and fallen inward. Dorothy ran for the brush and dustpan which hung against the bricks behind the stove.

“I’ll clean it up, Mrs. Hogan,” she said. “You go about your work, Celia.”

“We’ll have to dig a tunnel through to the shed door after breakfast,” declared Mrs. Hogan. “We’ve got to get through the shed to the barn, an’ then into the hen house. Surely, we can’t l’ave the critters ter starve. And there’s no knowing when this storm will stop. Ye’ll not git to school this day, I’m thinkin’, me young lady.”

“I am only glad that I am not out there in the lane under all this snow,” replied Dorothy, gravely.

After breakfast she went upstairs with Celia to peer out at the storm. It was, indeed, a blizzard. Scarcely a landmark was visible through the falling snow. The fences were, of course, long since drifted over; and the snow had been blown into the farmyard in a great mound, piled against the side of the house to the sill of the second floor windows, and completely covering the roofs of the lower buildings.

Mrs. Hogan put a huge boiler on the stove when they came down. She had not thawed her pump as yet; but she opened the barricaded door and into this boiler shoveled snow, from time to time, until she had melted sufficient to well fill the receptacle, and had dug quite a cavern in the snowbank.

Then, dressed in her half-mannish costume, the Amazon set to work with a steel shovel to really excavate a tunnel through the drift to the woodshed door. Dorothy and Celia helped by “trimming” the sides and roof of the tunnel, and trampling down the excavated snow under foot.

The passage to the woodshed door was short. Beyond the shed the snow filled all the space to the stables, and was heaped fifteen feet high. They cut out the snow in blocks and heaped it to one side within the shed. In two hours Mrs. Hogan, working as though tireless, opened the way to the stables and they could feed the stock. Fortunately there was a trap between the barn and the hennery through which they could throw corn and oats to the flock.

Tunneling through the snowbank Celia thought to be lots of fun; and Dorothy found it amusing. Mrs. Hogan’s grim face and grimmer remarks, however, proved that she considered the situation quite serious.

“You young’uns kape yer feet dry. Have no chills, nor colds, nor other didoes, now; for ’tis no knowin’ how long ’twould take a dochter to git here through these drifts—an’ however would we git word to such, anyhow, I dunno?”

Dorothy and Celia wrapped shawls around their shoulders again and went to the upper windows to look out. Although the flakes were bigger now, and the snow was not gathering so fast, they could not see far along the lane; and not a moving object appeared upon the surface of the drifts.

“Oh, I’m glad you are here, Dorothy Dale,” whispered Celia. “It would jes’ be dreadful to be smothered in with snow like this, with only Mrs. Ann Hogan—yes, it would!”

CHAPTER XIV
SEVERAL SURPRISING THINGS

“Now you’ve got to just tell me all about what it means!” declared Tavia, the moment the door had closed on the other girls and she and Dorothy were alone in their old room at Glenwood Hall. “Don’t you see that I’m just eaten up with curiosity?”

“Why, you don’t seem to have lost any flesh at all,” laughed Dorothy, pinching one of her friend’s cheeks while she kissed the other.

“Stop tantalizing! What does that card mean? Who is Tom Moran? How dare you have a gentleman friend, Dorothy Dale, with whom I am not acquainted?”

“What nonsense,” said Dorothy. “Tom Moran is—why, just Tom Moran.”

“Lucid as mud! And what, or who, is he to Olaine?”

“You puzzle me a whole lot more than you are puzzled yourself,” complained Dorothy. “I don’t understand—not the least little bit—what you tell me about Miss Olaine.”

“She was just as scared as she could be when she read this message to you, Doro,” and Tavia thrust the typewritten postal card under her friend’s eyes. “Read it and tell me what it means.”

“Oh, I can do that.”

“Well, do it!” cried Tavia. “Don’t hesitate so.”

“First I must tell you about Celia Moran——”

“Another stranger!” gasped Tavia.

“Just the dearest, funniest, most pitiful little girl——”

“I’m glad it’s a girl this time,” sniffed Tavia.

“Of course—Celia!”

“Well! go on?” urged Tavia.

So her friend began at the beginning—with her first meeting with the child from the foundling asylum in the Belding Station. And she related the particulars, too, of her recent adventure in the snow and her two nights and the Sunday spent at the Hogan farmhouse.

“That Hogan woman is a regular ogress. I wish I could take Celia away from there this very day,” sighed Dorothy. “Did you see her when she drove me in here?”

“The giantess? Of course! She looked so funny in that gray and purple sweater and the green hood——”

“No matter for laughing. Do you know what she made Mrs. Pangborn pay her for ‘me keep’, as she called it?”

“No.”

“Twenty dollars—think of it? She’s a terrible miser—and that poor little thing isn’t half fed.”

“The poor kid!” agreed Tavia, whose warm heart was touched by the story Dorothy told her.

“She wanted to come with us so badly,” sighed Dorothy. “But Mrs. Hogan made her stay and keep up the fire, and watch to see if the hens laid any eggs. They bring ’em right in from the nests for fear they will freeze,” explained Dorothy.

“I really believe, Tavia, if that little thing hadn’t been out gathering eggs Saturday evening, I would have laid down in the snow and died!”

“Oh, Doro! How dreadful!”

“I was ‘all in’, as Ned and Nat would say. Just at the last gasp when Celia heard me crying for help.”

“I’d like to hug her for that,” cried Tavia, her eyes shining.

“And so, I must find her brother if I can,” continued Dorothy, not very lucidly, it must be confessed. But Tavia had gained a general idea of the matter now and she said:

“That’s Tom Moran?”

“Yes. That’s her brother. ‘He builds bridges, and things.’ That is what Celia says. She remembers a lot for such a little thing. So I wrote to the local union in the city and asked if they knew him. And this,” said Dorothy, pursing her lips and shaking her head, “is their answer. It’s—it’s not very hopeful——”

“But for goodness sake tell me what Miss Olaine has to do with it?” demanded Tavia.

“Now, dear, you know very well I can’t tell you that,” admitted Dorothy, thoughtfully.

“She was just as startled——”

“Do you suppose it was Tom Moran’s name that startled her, or the signature of the secretary of the union? Or—or——?”

“Or, what else? What else is there in the note to scare her?” demanded Tavia.

“The school fire. Do you remember? It was an awful fire. Some of the children failed to get out in the fire drill. They were shut into a room on an upper floor, it seems to me—with a teacher——?”

“I can’t remember about it,” quoth Tavia, disappointed. “I remember the papers were full of it at the time. But what had this Tom Moran to do with it—with the fire, I mean?”

“I—I can’t think. I don’t remember his name, or any other detail of the fire,” agreed Dorothy.

“Let’s ask Miss Olaine.”

“I wouldn’t dare! You wouldn’t dare yourself, Tavia?”

“No—o. I guess I wouldn’t. She—she’s so different from the other teachers. I feel just as though she’d slap me!”

“Wait a minute!” exclaimed Dorothy, thinking hard. “Something Mrs. Pangborn said to me—I remember.”

“What about? What’s Mrs. Pangborn got to do with the mystery?”

“She hinted that there had been something in Miss Olaine’s life that excused her harshness—something that if we girls knew it would make us forgive her irritability.”

“What is it?” asked the curious Tavia.

“I don’t know. I haven’t the least idea. Mrs. Pangborn intimated that she had no right to tell us.”

“Why, I think that’s puzzling,” admitted Tavia. “But I can’t work up much sympathy for Olaine on that showing. I want details.”

“And I want details of Tom Moran’s mix-up with the Rector Street School fire. Oh, Tavia!”

“What is it?” demanded her friends, quite startled by the way Dorothy had clutched at her.

“I know how we can find out.”

“About Miss Olaine?”

“About Tom Moran and the fire. There are the files of the city papers. Father used to always keep files of The Bugle when he ran it in Dalton. Let’s go to town the very next chance we get and go to the office of the Courier. We can read all about the fire of two years ago.”

“Of course it would take you, Dorothy Dale, to think of that,” said Tavia, admiringly.

“Will you do it?”

“Of course. We’ll go Saturday.”

“But you will have to be careful and get no ‘conditions’ this week,” warned Dorothy.

“Oh! I’ll be as good as gold—you see,” promised Tavia.

And, really, it did seem as though even Miss Olaine could find nothing for which to find fault in Tavia’s conduct that week. The irrepressible tried very hard indeed to attend to nothing but her studies—and her meals!

She was almost perfect, even, in her French, and Tavia was not partial to French. “Goodness knows, I’ll never get to Paris, and what use is there in learning French in these United States, just so’s to be able to read the menus at the fashionable hotels?” complained Tavia.

“But, it is considered quite the thing,” suggested Ned Ebony.

“Oh, sure! everybody who’s made a little money in oil, or coal, or pork, or wheat, has to have a French teacher. Say, Doro! do you remember Mrs. Painter, in Dalton? The lady whose husband had an awful lot of money left him?”

“Oh, I remember!” laughed Dorothy. “Poor woman! She wanted to be so refined and educated all of a sudden.”

“That’s the lady,” said Tavia.

“What about her?” demanded Cologne.

“She tried to learn French. At any rate, she learned a few phrases, and she used to work them into conversation in such a funny way,” Tavia explained, giggling over the thought of the poor lady.

“She went into the butcher shop one day and asked Sam Smike, the butcher, if he had any ‘bon-vivant’.”

“‘Bon-vivant’?” gasped Cologne. “What—what——”

“That’s what Sam wanted to know,” giggled Tavia. “He says to her: ‘Boned what, ma’am?’

“And Mrs. Painter said, perfectly serious: ‘Why, bon-vivant, you know. That’s the French for good liver.’”

“Why, Tavia! how ridiculous!” exclaimed Ned Ebony. “It couldn’t be——”

“It’s true, just the same. At any rate, Sam Smike told it to me himself.”

However, even French did not floor Tavia that week. On Saturday Mrs. Pangborn made no objection to the two friends going to the city by train—presumably to do a little shopping.

And they did shop. They had three full hours in town, and they could afford the time. Then they went to the Courier office, and Dorothy sent in her father’s card and her own to one of the editors, and he kindly came out and allowed them to visit “the morgue,” as he called the biographical room, where a young man in spectacles and with a streak of dust on the side of his nose, lifted down heavy, bound volumes of the Courier and showed them how to find the articles for which they were in search.

The Rector Street School fire had been a local disaster of some moment. The first hastily written account, on the day of the fire, did not contain that which interested Dorothy and Tavia. But in the second day’s edition they found what they had never expected to learn—about both Celia Moran’s brother and Miss Olaine.

CHAPTER XV
WHY DID HE DISAPPEAR?

“Misses Dale and Travers, late for supper,” said the sharp voice of Miss Olaine. “Your excuses, please?”

This was the chums’ welcome as they entered the big entrance hall of Glenwood School after dark.

“Oh, Miss Olaine! the train was late, and we stopped on the way to——”

“That will do, Miss Travers,” said the teacher. “Other girls who came on that train were here ten minutes ago.”

“But they ran their legs off,” sniffed Tavia, when the teacher broke in with:

“And you took your time, of course, Octavia. Ten lines extra—Latin—Tuesday morning. I will point out which lines Monday. That is all.”

Tavia flared up and was evidently about to make the matter worse. But Dorothy pinched her, and pinched hard.

“You remember what we agreed coming over from the train,” she warned. “Swallow it like a man!”

“Oh—oh!” gasped Tavia. “She does make me so mad, Doro.”

“You wouldn’t have got the condition if you had kept still. That tongue of yours, Tavia, is like what Mrs. Hogan accused Celia of having: It’s hung in the middle and wags at both ends.”

“Well! it’s not fair!” grumbled her school chum.

“Of course not; but we agreed, fair or not, to bear with Miss Olaine—and to urge the other girls to bear with her. When she sits and wrings her hands and bites her lips so, we know what she is thinking of; don’t we?”

“Oh, yes!” admitted Tavia, with a shudder. “I know she is to be pitied. But it is dreadful hard to be picked upon the way she picks upon me——”

“Now, you know that’s nonsense,” replied Dorothy, sensibly. “If you would not answer back and give her an excuse for punishing you, you’d not be in trouble. She gave me no condition.”

“Oh, that’s your luck, that’s all,” sighed Tavia.

“You know that’s not so,” replied Dorothy, mildly. “Do be careful, Tavia. And let us tell the other girls and get them to try to be kind to Miss Olaine. I am very sorry for her.”

“Well—I s’pose—of course I am, too!” exclaimed the really warm-hearted Tavia. “But she does get my ‘mad up’ so easy!”

“You get mad without much provocation, it seems to me. Now, after church service to-morrow, let’s get the girls all in our room—our crowd, I mean—and tell them about the Rector Street School fire.”

“All right. The poor thing——”

“Miss Olaine?”

“Of course,” said Tavia. “The poor thing must be always remembering about the little kiddies, and how she came near to forgetting them——”

“And if it hadn’t been for the man on the steel beam outside——”

“Of course, that was your Tom Moran,” said Tavia.

“Celia’s Tom Moran,” corrected Dorothy.

But, never mind the further discussion of the matter between the two friends. The following is what Dorothy had copied out of the file of the Courier, and she read it to the other girls the next day, as proposed:

“The burning of that fire-trap, the Rector Street School, long since condemned by everybody but the Board of Education, could scarcely have been regrettable had it not been for the several terrifying incidents connected with it. Some of the hairbreadth escapes were related in yesterday’s Courier; but the details of that incident which was most perilous—the salvation of the seven little girls and the teacher left to perish on the upper floor of the schoolhouse—were not known when we went to press last evening.

“Although our fire department boys did their duty at every point, the spectacular rescue of these seven children and the teacher was accomplished by men at work upon the steel structure of the new Adrian Building, which was going up directly beside the burned schoolhouse.

“At the height of the fire the teacher and her charges were discovered at the window of a small room on the top floor, by a workman on a steel girder that was being raised by the steam winch to its place in the structure. The girder was twenty feet long and the man—by the name of Moran—was riding the beam when the fire broke out.

“He called to some helpers, and signalled the engineer below how he wished the girder handled. With a cable they swung the end of the heavy piece of steel so that its end rested on the sill of the window of the room where the teacher and her charges were trapped. The other end of the girder rested in the framework of the new building.

“Then the teacher, Rebecca Olaine, of 127 Morrell Street, this city, opened the lower sash and got out on the broad window sill. She was able to lift and pass to Moran each of the children, and he ran back along the narrow bridge and handed them to other men waiting beyond.

“Miss Olaine seemed to lose her strength when the last child was saved, and she could not walk the girder with the workman’s help. Fire had burst into the room then, and the smoke was so thick that just what occurred at the window could not well be seen from the ground.

“But in trying to drag the teacher forth, Moran seemed to lose his footing, and fell back into the room. Two other workmen seized the teacher and carried her, insensible, to safety.

“By that time members of Hose Company Number 7 reached the steel bridge and took upon themselves the rescue of the workman. He was pulled out of the fire somewhat scorched; but inquiry at the hospital this afternoon failed to discover his whereabouts. He had had his burns dressed, and had left the hospital early in the day.

“Our reporter could learn nothing at 127 Morrell Street regarding the condition of Miss Olaine, save that the doctor had forbidden her seeing anybody at present. None of the children saved with her was even scorched.”

“Well!” gasped Nita Brent. “Whatever do you think about that? Is it sure-to-goodness our Olaine?”

“Our own dear, timid, sweet Miss Olaine,” drawled Tavia who—although she agreed with Dorothy that the terrible adventure through which Miss Olaine had passed, should be considered as a reason for the teacher’s unfortunate manner and disposition—could not so freely forgive her as did Dorothy.

“The poor thing!” murmured Cologne.

“I don’t know!” blurted out Ned Ebony, shaking her head. “What’s it all for, Doro?”

“I think we ought to pity her and—and take her scoldings with a wee hit of patience,” said Dorothy, quietly. “She must have been greatly shaken up by the fire——”

“So she wants to shake us down,” observed Tavia, “to pay up for it.”

“It made her nervous and irritable,” said Dorothy, with a look at her chum. “She is more to be pitied——”

“Than censured,” groaned the irrepressible Tavia. “All right, Doro! I’ll agree to play no more tricks on her.”

“You’d better decide on that,” grumbled Ned. “Otherwise you will not graduate from old Glenwood with flying colors.”

“Let’s all ‘be easy’ on Miss Olaine,” said Dorothy, calmly. “I understand that Miss Olaine was not fit to teach for a year after the fire, and that the reason she came to Glenwood is because it made her nervous to teach in a big, crowded city school again. I got that much out of Miss Pangborn this morning after prayers.

“Of course, if Doro says we must treat her nicely, we must,” said Nita. “But she—she’s just an old bear!”

“Who dares call my Doro a bear?” demanded Tavia. “There will at once be trouble bruin.”

“Now, you know very well I meant Olaine,” complained Nita.

“She’s just horrid,” added Molly Richards. “She’s given me conditions—just for nothing—too!”

“Don’t weep about it, Dicky,” advised Tavia. “I claim to have the greatest record for receiving extras without cause since the beginning of Miss Olaine’s reign.”

“Anyhow,” said Cologne, “if Dorothy says we ought to excuse her, and try and treat her nicely——”