Nettie Parsons, wiping her eyes.
"I don't want any more breakfast," said Jennie, pushing her plate away.
"Don't talk like that, Nettie. You'll get me to crying too. And that
always spoils my digestion."
"If Ruth isn't with us when we get our diplomas, I'm sure I don't want
any!" exclaimed Mary Cox. And she meant it, too. Mary Cox believed that
she owed her brother's life to Ruth Fielding, and although she was not
naturally a demonstrative girl, there was nobody at Briarwood Hall who
admired the girl of the Red Mill more than Mary.
In fact, the threat of disaster to Ruth's graduation plans cast a pall of
gloom over the school. The moving pictures were forgotten; Amy Gregg's
part in the destruction of the West Dormitory ceased to be a topic of
conversation. Was Ruth Fielding going to be held in quarantine? grew to be
a more momentous question than any other.
Ruth, however, was only absent from her accustomed haunts for two days.
The second day she remained to attend the patient because Amy begged so
hard to have her stay.
In her weakness and pain the sullen, secretive girl had turned
instinctively to the one person who had been uniformly gentle and kind to
her throughout all her trouble. Nothing that Amy had done or said, had
turned Ruth from her; and the barriers of girl's nature and of her evil
passions were broken down.
It was not, perhaps, wholly Amy Gregg's fault that her disposition was so
warped. She had received bad advice from some aunts, who had likewise set
the child a bad example in their treatment of Mr. Gregg's second wife,
when he had brought her home to be a mother to Amy.
The poor child suffered so much from the effect of the poison ivy that the
other girls, and not alone those of her own grade, "just _had_ to be sorry
for Amy," as Mary Pease said.
"To think!" said that excitable young girl. "She might even lose her
eyesight if she's not careful. My! it must be dreadful to get poisoned
with that nasty ivy. I'll be afraid to go into the woods the whole
summer."
Of course, it took time for these sentiments to circulate through the
school, and for a better feeling for Amy Gregg to come to the surface; but
the poor girl was laid up for two weeks in Mrs. Sadoc Smith's best
bedroom, and a fortnight is a long time in a girls' boarding school. At
least, it sometimes seems so to the pupils.
What helped change the girls' opinion of Amy, too, was the fact that Mrs.
Tellingham announced in chape
|