rather dramatic pose, which she had mentally
rehearsed many times that day. Also, she had chosen this quiet hour
and place as the most effective for her purpose, and she had almost
coerced Lady Jane into letting her come.

"Schoolmates and friends, I want to confess to you the meanest things
that ever were done at dear Oak Knowe. From the moment she came here
I disliked Dorothy Calvert and was jealous of her. In less than a week
she had won Miss Muriel's heart as well as that of almost everybody
else. I thought I could drive her out of the school, if I made the
rest of you hate her, too. I'd begun to teach the boot-boy to draw,
having once seen him attempting it. I painted him a death's head for a
copy, and gave him my pocket-money to buy a mask of the Evil One."

"Oh! Gwendolyn how dared you? You horrid, wicked girl!" cried gentle
Marjorie, moved from her gentleness for once.

"Well, I'll say this much in justice to myself. That thing went
further than I meant, which was only to have him put pictures of it
around in different places. He'd told me about keeping a goat in the
old drying-room, and of course he couldn't always keep it still. The
kitchen folks put the pictures and the goat's noises together and
declared the house was haunted. I told the maids that they might lay
that all to the new scholar from the States, and a lot of them
believed me."

Even loyal Laura now shrank aside from her paragon, simply horrified.
She had helped to spread the rumor that Dorothy was a niece of
Dawkins, but she had done no worse than that. It had been left to
Jack-boot-boy to finish the contemptible acts. He got phosphorus from
the laboratory, paint from any convenient color box, and his first
success as a terrifier had been in the case of Millikins-Pillikins, at
whose bed he had appeared--with the results that have been told. He
it had been who had frightened the maid into leaving, and had spread
consternation in the kitchen.

"And in all these things he did, I helped him. I planned some of them
but he always went ahead and thought worse ones out. Yet nobody,
except the simpletons below stairs, believed it was Dorothy who had
'bewitched' the house," concluded that part of Gwendolyn's confession.

Yet still she stood there, firmly facing the contempt on the faces of
her schoolmates, knowing that that was less hard to bear than her own
self-reproach had been. And presently she went on:

"Then came that affair at the Maiden's