ankle--I was watching you and I saw--and
you didn't make the least little bit of fuss about it. Well, if you've
done that once you can do it again. Now, if I ask you to play in my
team for the next dormitory match, will you do it?"

"Yes," said Gerry simply, raising her eyes to the head girl's face.
And after a deep look into them, Muriel dropped her hands from her
junior's shoulders with a satisfied smile.

"That's all right, then," she said. "And now we'd better both buck up,
or we'll be frantically late for tea."

CHAPTER XII

THE NEW FORM-MISTRESS

"I say! Have you heard the news?" cried Hilda Burns, bursting the next
morning into the Lower Fifth sitting-room, where the form was gathered
awaiting the summons to prayers.

All the girls looked up at Hilda's excited entrance. Even Gerry, who
as usual was finding in a book solace from her loneliness, stopped
reading to hear what the news might be.

"No! What is it?" asked various voices; and Hilda, conscious of the
importance of the tidings she carried, said impressively:

"Pretty Polly's ill. Really ill. Not just influenza and bed for a day
or two. She was taken suddenly bad in the night, and they had to send
for the doctor. And it's appendicitis, and she's got to have an
operation at once, and she's going off in an ambulance to a nursing
home this morning."

"I say! Poor Polly! I am sorry," said Jack. And the whole form
proceeded to express its dismay more or less appropriately. In spite
of her strictness and extreme prejudices in favour of tidiness, Miss
Parrot was popular with her form; and real regret at losing her so
unexpectedly was mingled with sorrow for her illness. It was not for a
few minutes, however, that it dawned upon the Lower Fifth that this
sudden calamity would leave it without a form-mistress.

"But I say! What about _us_?" exclaimed Dorothy at length. "Who's
going to take our form? We shall have to have somebody."

"Miss Oakley's wired to an agency asking them to send someone," said
Hilda, who had an uncanny knack of finding out these sorts of things.
Her information proved to be correct, for when prayers were over and
the Lower Fifth marched as usual into its classroom, Miss Oakley was
waiting there for them; and after telling them of their mistress's
illness, she came at once to the point which was exercising the minds
of the form.

"I am glad to say that I have succeeded in getting somebody to fill
Miss P