West Haven High School, Miss Gray, the Principal, had often said, had all the merits of a public and private school combined. It was more thorough than a private school and the teachers were more in touch with the pupils than is usual at a public school. Miss Gray herself was deeply interested in the welfare of her girls and studied carefully the ability and temperament of each one.

When, therefore, a strange and very terrible complaint was made to her one morning about one of her school girls, she was too shocked to reason intelligently about it, and ended by dismissing the complainants quietly from her private office until she sent for them again.

Exactly what the complaint was no one knew except those who had made it. It was kept a careful secret. But in school rumors arise in the most subtle way. They are whispered about behind doors at recess; written on the margins of text books in class and hastily rubbed out; vaguely hinted at here and there until they spread from room to room and class to class and gradually the whole school is bursting with the news. And the poor victim may all this time be entirely unconscious that she is the very centre of a seething, boiling pot of gossip.

This is how the present rumor started in West Haven High School:

One afternoon when the last gong had sounded the sophomore class gathered in the locker room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers were only so in name. There had never been any keys to them, because there had never been any need to keep belongings under lock and key in West Haven High School, where most of the pupils had known each other all their lives.

On this particular afternoon, every incident of which our four friends will remember as long as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass, as usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent over an automobile map, were making plans for a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her Latin for the next day. It was that lingering, lazy time after school is over, which all school girls know.

Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung open the door of her locker, next to that of Belle Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in looking at herself in her own private mirror, hung on the inside of her locker door.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” exclaimed Fannie Alta, with a very excited and strange manner. “I have lost something. Something which my mamma gave me to keep for her. What shall I do? What shall I do?”

“Why, what was it, Fannie?” asked the other girls, gathering around her sympathetically. “Let us help you find it.”

“Oh, oh, it is terrible!” cried the young Spanish girl, wringing her hands and weeping in her handkerchief alternately. “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

“Was it money you lost?” asked Billie, in her usual rather abrupt manner.

“Yes, yes; how did you know?”

“I didn’t know, I guessed,” answered Billie.

“Did you leave it in your locker?” some one else asked.

“Yes, yes. I left it there at noon to-day. Twenty dollars my mamma gave to me to keep for her. Oh, is it not terrible? She will eat me with her anger.”

Billie could hardly keep the corners of her mouth from curving with an irrepressible smile when she remembered those two front tusks of Mme. Alta’s, which seemed to be uncovered, ready for work at any moment.

“Are you sure it is not there still?” asked Elinor quietly. “I happened to look up when you came into the room. You simply flung open your locker door and then began to cry. Why don’t you look in your pockets before you decide that you have lost the money?”

Fannie flashed an angry glance at Elinor.

“How did you know that I had not looked before; that I have not looked twice, many times?”

“I didn’t,” answered Elinor. “Have you?”

Fannie did not reply and from that moment she and Elinor disliked each other intensely.

Then the girls began looking carefully about the room.

“I feel as if I had it hidden about me,” said Nancy, giggling, as she helped in the search.

The others laughed, too, which somewhat relieved the situation. Nothing is more uncomfortable than for money to be lost mysteriously in a company of people.

“We do look as guilty as the forty thieves,” ejaculated Rosomond McLane, a fat, funny girl, who was popular with the whole class.

No one was more active in the search than Belle Rogers. She shook Fannie’s text books violently and scattered the papers about, to Fannie’s intense annoyance. She felt in Fannie’s pockets, examined the lining of her hat, and made herself so officious and numerous that Fannie herself exclaimed with much irritation:

“Please do not, Belle. You know it is not there.”

Only Elinor sat quietly on the window sill watching the search, with just the faintest shadow of scornful incredulity on her handsome face.

“Elinor Butler, do you believe I have been telling a falsehood?” Fannie finally exclaimed in exasperation.

“What a little spitfire you are, Fannie,” answered Elinor. “Just because I don’t choose to grovel on the floor looking for your money. I can help you quite as much by thinking, and I am thinking very hard, I can assure you.”

At last the search was abandoned. The pocketbook containing the money could not be found, and the young girls, swinging their book straps,—bags were too childish for High School girls,—strolled up the street in groups discussing the strange disappearance of Fannie’s twenty dollars.

In the meantime, the Motor Maids, laughing and talking together, tossed their books into the red car and then climbed in themselves. Somehow, Fannie’s loss did not seem very real. Billie had cranked up the machine and was about to back out when Fannie’s voice called from the locker room:

“Wait! Stop!”

“Well, you see we haven’t gone yet,” answered Elinor severely.

“Elinor, you are so hard on Fannie Alta. I’m sorry for her,” said Mary. “Mother wouldn’t bite me if I lost twenty dollars, but I’d hate to lose it just the same.”

“I didn’t mean to be hard on her,” answered Elinor, “but my instincts tell me not to trust her.”

“When did they tell you, Elinor?” laughed Billie.

Elinor’s instincts were a great joke to her three devoted friends. But the appearance of Fannie running breathlessly, with Belle following at a dignified pace, interrupted Elinor’s invariable reply to jests about her instincts: “You know they are never wrong.”

“What is the matter now, Fannie?” asked Billie, who was standing in the front of her car, her arms folded, like a captain on the hurricane deck of his ship.

“Would you mind——” Fannie stammered. “I mean—I think I have a right to ask—I want you to look in your pockets. I believe——” she continued, getting bolder every moment. “I am sure that one of you will find my pocketbook——”

Billie’s frank, candid face flushed as scarlet as her motor car, while the color left Elinor’s cheeks as white as death. Nancy gave a little frightened giggle, and Mary Price neither flushed nor turned white, but looked quietly on.

“Really, Fannie,” spoke Elinor, “you are not in the lawless South American country you came from, whatever it is. You are among decent people, not thieves, and perhaps you had better remember that hereafter. Start on, Billie,” she commanded, sitting as erect as a queen at her own coronation.

“But I insist!” screamed Fannie.

“She has a right,” put in Belle.

“Get out of the road,” cried Billie, backing recklessly out of the shed, turning with a wide, flourishing curve and whizzing out of the gate at full speed.

“Well, of all the insolence,” cried Elinor. “What does she mean and how does she dare——” her voice choked with indignation.

“Don’t you think it was Belle Rogers who put her up to it out of revenge?” suggested Mary.

“If it was, I can’t see what she had to gain by it,” said Billie. “Elinor sailed into them and we nearly sailed over them. It seems to me we had a good deal the best of it.”

Billie dropped the girls at their homes, as she was in the habit of doing every afternoon after school, and whirled up Cliff Street to the old Campbell homestead. On the way she passed Belle Rogers, who also lived in that fashionable section, but she did not ask her to get in and ride up the hill. Billie had a frank, open nature, but with her whole soul she distrusted that pink and white doll-baby face and those innocent china blue eyes.

In the meantime Mary had taken off her rather threadbare little jacket and hung it in the closet. Her mother was resting on the couch. She looked pale and tired that day, and Mary walked softly so as not to disturb her. Slipping off her mittens, she thrust them into her coat pocket. Her fingers encountered something and she pulled out a flat, foreign-looking pocketbook. Mary’s face turned white and she leaned against the wall of the closet and closed her eyes.

“They must have put it in my pocket,” she whispered. “What shall I do?”

“Mary, dearest,” called her mother.

“Yes, mother,” she answered, quietly slipping the purse into the pocket again. “I won’t tell her now,” she thought. “She is worried enough already.” And when presently she kissed her mother, no one could have told that the young girl was more frightened than she had ever been in all her lifetime.

The next morning Mary hurried to school without waiting for Billie and her car. She had something to study, she said. But Fannie was there before her, waiting in the locker room. Mary tried to calm her beating heart as she looked steadily at the other girl. Then, with a sudden resolution, she marched straight up to Fannie, and thrust the pocketbook into her hand.

“You put this in my pocket,” she said. “I don’t know what you have against me, or what I ever did to you, but if you ever do it again, I shall go straight to Miss Gray.”

Fannie took the pocketbook without a word, and after that a very different version of the story got out. Finally it reached Miss Gray’s ears.

But the most serious thing of all was that things began disappearing every day out of the girls’ lockers.