"I think we ought to do something to celebrate Miss Craigie's return," remarked Noreen.

They were dressing for supper in Blue Dorm, Joey, Barbara, Syb, and Noreen; and as usual they were dressing in a hurry.

"What sort of thing?" Joey demanded, trying to disentangle hooks from her hair.

"Something to show we're jolly pleased she's come back. Just think, she might have died of that loathly 'flu'; lots of people have."

"Shut it, you old ghoul," ordered Barbara; "she's all right again now, thank goodness!"

"And we ought to celebrate her all-rightness," Noreen said triumphantly.

"Violets?" suggested Joey.

"Silly cuckoo, how are we to get them?"

"What do you want, Noreen?" Syb asked impatiently.

"How about charades after supper—and ask her to come and see them?"

"Frightfully short time to think of anything decent," objected Syb; "besides, Miss Craigie won't want to leave her dear Miss Lambton, you bet."

"Let's ask her too."

"That doesn't give us a decent charade."

"Can't we think of something?"

"Not something good enough."

"P'r'aps you'd like to do some scenes from Hamlet, if you want to be so very high-class," Noreen suggested scornfully. Remove II. B were taking Hamlet in literature, and Noreen and the Literature Mistress were usually at loggerheads.

It was that suggestion which gave Joey her idea. "I say," she burst out, "why shouldn't we do a charade on the lines of Hamlet's player-people? You know—where the poison was poured into the poor chap's ear—and ask all the Staff to come, and see whether the Professor looks guilty and shrieks, 'Lights!' because he's doing something evil with his stinks, as Noreen says, or just has a war-strain appearance. It needn't be a noisy charade to upset him if it's just strain."

Noreen thumped Joey on the back. "Topping plan! What word shall we have?"

"German?" suggested Joey. "The first syllable could be Germ, you know—those things Matron is always fussing about——"

"Or the Huns putting them into wells," Barbara interrupted in great excitement.

"What about 'an'?" asked Syb.

"Couldn't she be a German girl, called Anne, Anna really, who is pretending to be a schoolgirl, and really plotting and spying?" Joey said.

"My word, Joey, you're coming on. I'm less surprised you got the scholarship," Noreen cried. "We—Gabrielle and Joey and I—settled this afternoon that someone ought to look into the matter of the Professor's hatefulness, and it's us that are going to," she added cheerfully and ungrammatically, for the benefit of Syb and Barbara. "If he's all right our charade won't hurt him—he'll like it; if he's not...."

The gong sounded.

"Soufflez! Regardez glissant, mes enfants," Noreen cried, tying her hair-ribbon with desperate speed. "We must fix up our charade after supper; and look here! we must get some of the others to perform first, while we're fixing it. Ingrid might recite,—she's awfully good,—and we'll get Gabrielle to fiddle. Joey, you'd better do the asking Miss Craigie—oh, and of course you'll have to go to the Head first, as we want all the Staff. Point out it's an occasion."

"Oh, I say, won't one of you?" asked poor Joey; but Noreen was adamant.

"You're rather in favour with the Head, I believe, and anyhow you've swanked enough about Miss Craigie. It's clearly your duty to get leave for the show. We'll do the rest."

"All right," Joey agreed resignedly, and then the inhabitants of Blue Dorm tore downstairs at a record pace, only just escaping an order mark for lateness by the skin of their teeth.

Miss Conyngham received Joey's request very graciously, and promised to invite the Staff to witness the performance and bring them with her to Queen's Hall in half an hour's time. Joey flew back, very satisfied to find Noreen, Barbara, and Sybil in one of the small classrooms, opening from the Hall, distractedly considering the all-important charade. But they were cheerful too, for it appeared that Ingrid had consented to recite, and Gabrielle and the musical genius of Remove II., Clare Estcome, to play.

"We'll put the play last," Noreen said impressively, "and we four will do it, and say nothing to anybody else. Joey, just tell some of these juniors who are doing nothing to arrange the chairs for a show and pull the curtains across the platform; and then we can get on to our job. You're sure the Professor is coming?"

"Miss Conyngham laughed frightfully nicely and said she was sure all the Staff would be delighted, and she thought it a topping idea," Joey said; and on that the four got to work in earnest.

Miss Conyngham gave gracious permission for the two forms below Remove II. to sit up for the performance, so a large audience was already assembled when the staff of Redlands swept into the Queen's Hall—Miss Conyngham with her arm through Miss Craigie's—to place themselves in the "stalls" specially retained for them. Joey, watching through a chink in the curtains shutting off the platform, was delighted to see that the Professor sat upon the other side of Miss Conyngham. He looked placid and pleased enough now, so far as his large, pallid face could be said to show any expression at all. The audience was further swelled by the servants, indoor and out, even including two or three men who were repairing pipes.

The performance began with Gabrielle's newest violin-piece—a nocturne, executed very correctly but rather nervously. The school applauded vigorously, as they would have applauded anything from the popular Heads of the Upper or Lower School. Ingrid followed, jarringly dramatic in Noyes' Highwayman, and was violently appreciated. Clare, not having to face her audience, the piano being sideways to the stage, gave the most successful performance of the three, but took a strictly secondary place in the way of applause.

Then, after some whispering and stifled giggling, Joey was pushed forward to the front of the stage, and the curtain drawn back a chink. She spoke through it.

"I have to announce that the forthcoming charade is in two syllables and three scenes. The third is the complete word."

She withdrew, and all the juniors started thinking aloud of two-syllabled words. They were quite audible on the stage, where Barbara, spectacled and padded as to body, was bending over a steaming fish-kettle, prodding it nervously. "I thought if you boiled germs you killed them," she whispered. "This seems so jolly like the witches in Macbeth."

"Go on, you silly ass," urged Noreen. "It looks all right anyhow, and you've got the photo-plates for growing the germs on. Come on, Joey, I must tie you up."

Joey, attired in a plaid going-out frock belonging to one of the little ones, to represent a kilt, a khaki sports coat, buttoned across, and two box straps for a Sam-Browne belt, was forthwith lashed brutally to a curtain pole, and ordered not to so much as breathe for fear she should move it and it should become plain to the audience that it was leaning against her and she could have walked off with it quite easily.

Syb, also rather sketchy as to uniform, but with an unmistakable German cap to make her nationality clear, stood by with a home-made bayonet of stupendous size. Noreen, pillowy as to figure and checked as to blouse, and with her curly, dark hair tightly strained off her forehead, hovered near the Professor, with a large wooden spoon, whether to stir soup or germs seemed doubtful. She waved this spoon impressively, and sent a thrilling whisper to the side of "Draw the curtains."

The curtains jerked back and after a pause to allow of sufficient thrill upon the part of the audience, Noreen inquired sepulchrally:

"Mein fater, is the mixture slab and strong?"

"As strong as thy soup on Sundays, my daughter," was the reply. "As strong as the accursed British Army thinks it is——"

"And proves it is," remarked the dauntless captive at the curtain pole, and was promptly prodded with the bayonet to induce a respectful silence.

The Professor, in very good English, with an occasional lapse into a German word, and a masterly repetition of "Tod und Teufel!" at regular intervals, proceeded to explain to his intelligent daughter (who stirred soup over a stove at the back of the stage, between times to add realism) that he was engaged in growing germs of a horrible disease which was to go as far as possible towards exterminating the "accursed Englanders," and that when he had, so to speak, bottled them, she was to take them to England and cast them into all receptacles of drinking water throughout the kingdom. To avert suspicion she was to let her hair down, attire herself in a djibbah, and assume the character of an English schoolgirl. The fair Anna delightedly accepted the commission, and retired from the stage to change the checked blouse, and the Professor ladled out presumably spoonfuls of germ on to the photographic slides, while informing the English prisoner that his accursed race would soon be non-existent. The Englishman, returning an undaunted reply, was again prodded violently, and Anna returning in a djibbah and looking marvellously thinner, passed him with the taunting gibe that she would pass anywhere as an English girl, and he was powerless to save his country, and marched out en route for England, carrying a dispatch case full of bottled germs.

The Professor and the guard thereupon sat down to drink "Confusion to perfidious England," which they did with great gusto and succumbed to the force of brandy neat (they stated it was that) with much speed. As soon as they had their heads down on a table, which shook with their snores, the English prisoner set to work to free himself, and succeeded in doing so just as the curtains were drawn in obedience to frenzied whispers from Noreen from behind. Joey laid down her curtain pole, and flew to the chink, regardless of the flattering applause that was greeting the first scene of this thrilling drama.

"What is the Professor looking like, Noreen?"

"He's clapping quite a lot," Noreen explained, in a gusty whisper; and Joey, peering over her shoulder at the large, pallid face and the black moustache, saw that Noreen was quite right. The Professor was clapping as vigorously as Miss Craigie herself.

"It must be war-strain," said Joey, and they rang up the curtain on Scene II., which showed Anna or Anne in her dormitory at a girls' school, which appeared to consist in one other girl only and a superannuated mistress (Syb), whose aggressive spectacles did not seem much to assist her defective sight. She tottered up to say good-night to her pupils, calling Barbara out with her to unhook her dress, which opportunity was seized upon by Anna to mention in a brief soliloquy, that she was only waiting till her room-mate was asleep to steal out and introduce her father's germs (alternately alluded to as "flu-bugs" and "bubonic plague") into the neighbouring reservoir, this proceeding being the prelude to the abrupt departure of "Anne" from the English pig-dog boarding-school for good.

Barbara returned on the enunciation of this sentiment, and after a brief conversation with the obviously unsympathetic Anne about her brother—a prisoner in Germany—the two girls lay down in their dressing-gowns upon a sofa that was rather a tight fit for one, and fell instantly into sound stage slumber.

After a thrilling moment of silence, Anne rose up, lit a candle, held it close to the eyes of the slumbering Barbara, and remarking, "She sleeps, the English pig-dog. Ach Himmel! Now can I do what I will," she seized the Horlick's Malted Milk bottle, large size, which contained the germs, and stole out. She had hardly closed the door when Barbara sat up, crying, "Am I dreaming, or did she say pig-dog? If so, she is no English Anne, but a German spy among us. And what has she gone to do?"

The question was answered by a call from beneath the window at the back of the stage, and Barbara, dashing to it, called, "Jock! It's never you! Come up; I'm alone."

Joey, hoisted from below by Ingrid, appeared at the open window, with, triumph of realism, her hair and clothes wet, for it was raining; struggled through, with much display of thin legs, and said dramatically, "Has she loosed her bugs?"

The explanation that followed was a triumph of brevity, and brother and sister dashed out to try and cut Anne off before she reached the reservoir. The curtain fell, amid tumultuous applause, and a jovial request from Professor Trouville that they would be "vary careful not to drop the bottle and let zose fierce animals loose upon us."

The third scene required no preparation, and was brief indeed. The aged Head Mistress discovered asking frantically, of no one in particular, what can have happened to her pupils; to her enter Joey and Barbara, dragging between them Anne, defiant, and with the germ bottle torn from her hand—unopened.

The Highland officer explained the situation in two sentences, and Anne, in a superior German accent, mentioned that from her point of view to torture prisoners and let loose disease upon women and children were right and proper—because she was—Hoch! Hoch! a German!

Curtain, amid thunders of applause.

The four came down into the hall to be congratulated. Miss Conyngham paid a stately compliment to the acting; Miss Craigie, with a grave face, rather belied by her twinkling eyes, admired the chemistry; even Ingrid remarked condescendingly, "Not half bad for kids."

Joey, standing in the midst of a congratulatory group of Remove II. B girls, felt a touch on her arm, and, turning, found herself face to face with the Professor. He was smiling quite pleasantly.

"A clefare and entertaining little play, Mees Jocelyn Graham," he said. "And it is you that plan it, is it not? My congratulations."

"Oh, thanks awfully; but it wasn't me really—we all four did it," Joey began, in some confusion, when Noreen caught what she said, and interrupted.

"Don't listen to her, Professor Trouville; she planned it really; and it was jolly brainy of her, wasn't it?"

The Professor smiled, his curious, sphinx-like smile.

"I thank you, Mees Noreen. I thought that I congratulate the right one, but your friend of the scholarship is modest, n'est ce pas?"

"Really the old chap was quite human for once, wasn't he?" Noreen remarked, as the four went up to Blue Dorm a few minutes later. "I hope Gabrielle went for him about the babes while he was in this yielding mood. She won't get her nose snapped off quite so close to her face."

But Joey didn't answer; she was wondering why it was that she had found the Professor's pleasantness so singularly unpleasant.