e: she would keep her knowledge of the thing until Susan
herself confessed, or assurance was made doubly sure; for suppose,
after all, Susan had written the story, how could she have known about
it in that magazine? She had never lent it to her; she had never read
it to any of her room-mates, or to any one in the school, proud of it
as she was. Indeed, the more she thought of it, the more sure she was
that she ought to be ashamed of herself for such a suspicion, and,
strange as it may seem, the more sure she also was, that almost word
by word Susan had stolen the story.

"I was frightened at a thought I had, a dreadful thought; I wouldn't
have any one know it. Don't ask me, Dody, please don't; let us talk
about something else," she said.

Then she began to talk rapidly over the events of the evening, not, as
Dorothy noticed, mentioning Susan or her success. Dorothy wondered
over it, and an unpleasant thought came into her mind.

"Can it be that Marion is jealous of Sue, and disappointed and vexed
that her piece wasn't taken any more notice of? I'm sure it was an
excellent story, 'How Ben Fought a Prairie Fire.'" Marion had read it
to her before handing it in, and she had been much interested in it,
but it didn't compare with Susan's, and it wasn't like Marion to feel
so. She never had shown such a spirit before.

Neither Susan nor Gladys came to their room until the last moment
allowed for remaining away. Susan was overwhelmed with congratulations
on her success. The teacher of rhetoric told her she felt repaid for
all the hours she had spent in teaching her, by the skill she had
shown in this composition, and if she continued to improve, she saw
nothing to prevent her taking her place, by and by, among the best
writers in the land. Kate Underwood pretended to be vexed, "having her
laurels taken away from her," she said "was not to be borne;" and
Delia Williams, the rival of Kate in the estimation of the school,
made even more fun than Kate over her own disappointment. Some of the
girls made a crown of bright papers and would have put it on Susan's
head, but she testily pushed it away.

Susan's love of prominence was well known in the school, and even this
small rejection of popular applause they wondered over.

And when the girls began to cluster around her, and to ask if she had
ever been to that West Rock, if there was really such a place, and if
all those things she wrote of so beautifully had ever happened? s