hould come in?"

"And I guess Miss Brokaw or anybody would want to know what I saw that
night of the fire," declared Mary Pease, wildly. "_I_ know whose room the
fire started in, and _how_ it started."

"Mary!" cried Ruth, rising from her seat, while the girls of the class
uttered wondering exclamations.

But Mary was hysterical now.

"I saw a light in _her_ room!" she cried, pointing an accusing finger at
the white-faced and shaking Amy. "I peeped through the keyhole, and it was
a candle burning on her table. She said she didn't have a candle. Bah!"

"Be still, Mary!" commanded Ruth again.

Amy Gregg was terror-stricken and shrank away from her accuser; but the
latter was too excited to heed Ruth.

"I know all about it. So does Miss Scrimp. I told her. That Amy Gregg left
the candle burning when she went to supper and it fell off her table into
the waste basket.

"And that," concluded Mary Pease, "was how the fire started that burned
down the West Dormitory, and I don't care who knows it, so there!"

CHAPTER XVII

ANOTHER OF CURLY'S TRICKS

Miss Scrimp, the matron of the old West Dormitory, had bound Mary Pease to
secrecy. But, as Jennie put it, "the binding did not hold and _Pease_
spilled the _beans_."

The story flew over the school like wildfire. Miss Scrimp, actually in
tears, was inclined to blame Ruth Fielding for the outbreak of the story.

"You ought to have taken Mary Pease and run her right into a closet!"
declared the matron. "Such behavior!"

Ruth was a good deal chagrined that the story should have come out while
she was monitor; but she really did not see how she could have helped it.
The quarrel between Amy Gregg and Mary Pease had commenced before Ruth had
gone into the classroom.

"And how could you help it?" cried the faithful Jennie. "I expect little
Pease has been aching to tell all these weeks. She should have been
quarantined, in the first place."

But there was nothing to do about it now, save "to pick up the pieces."
And that was no light task. Feeling ran high in Briarwood Hall against Amy
Gregg.

Some of the girls of her own age would not speak to her. Many of the older
girls made her feel by every glance and word they gave her that she was
taboo. And it was whispered on the campus that Amy would be sent home by
Mrs. Tellingham, if she could not be made to pay, or her folks be made to
pay, something toward the damage her carelessness had brought about.

Ruth she