ll the confessing for you. At any
other time the Lower Fifth would have been seriously annoyed with Jack
for having thus forestalled the dramatic little scene it had planned
with the head girl. But to-night the whole form was so genuinely upset
and penitent about its treatment of Gerry Wilmott that--although they
did not know quite what to say for a moment or two--they bore no grudge
against the informer.

"There's something Miss Oakley wants me to tell you about Gerry," went
on Muriel, surveying the discomfited faces before her. "It's not to go
any further, though. Only Gerry's own form are to know about it, and
Miss Oakley trusts to your honour never to mention it to Gerry herself
unless she confides in you of her own free will. I didn't know it
until to-day, when Miss Oakley sent for me to go to her after we'd
taken Gerry to the sick-room. If I had known it, I should have behaved
very differently towards her myself! It seems that she was in a bad
air-raid three years ago, when she was almost a kid. The house she was
in was wrecked and a nurse she was awfully fond of was killed in front
of her eyes, while she herself was pinned down underneath some wreckage
for hours and hours before they could get her out. She wasn't hurt,
but it upset her nerves completely. And it's mostly that that has made
her so shy and nervous and funky of things. Her people sent her here
to see what school would do for her. Nothing was said about her awful
experience, because she can't bear to talk about it, for one thing, and
for another the doctors didn't want her to be treated any differently
from the other girls. And they thought she would have been if people
knew. But Miss Oakley says I'm to tell you now, so that you may treat
Gerry with more consideration in the future."

There was a dead silence in the room. If anything had been wanting to
complete the Lower Fifth's humiliation it was this! The one excuse the
form had had for its conduct had been Gerry's cowardice, and it put the
finishing touch to its repentance to discover that even this was not
entirely her own fault. The Lower Fifth's remorse, which had been
acute enough before, was almost unbearable now!

"Well," said Muriel at length, as the silence still continued--"well?
What are you going to do about it?"

"We thought that--that perhaps we'd better make Gerry a public
apology," faltered Dorothy, her usual sang-froid deserting her for once
under Muriel's cold