Betty Wales, Senior Part 30

The Blunderbuss nodded vigorously. "Certainly I will. I'll bring them all here to-night. I don't want them for anything. I never wanted them.

I'm sure I don't know why I took them. Oh, there's just one thing," she added hastily, "that I can't bring. It isn't with the rest. But I've got everything else all safe and I'll come right after dinner. Good-bye."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GIRLS WATCHED HER IN BEWILDERMENT]

The girls watched her go in a daze of bewilderment. Just outside the door she evidently b.u.mped into some one, and her clattering laugh and loud, "Goodness, how you scared me!" sounded as light-hearted and unconcerned as possible.

"How did you ever guess that she was the one?" Eleanor asked at last.

"It just came over me," Betty answered. "But, why, she doesn't seem to care one bit!"

"About running into me?" asked Jean Eastman, appearing suddenly in the doorway. "Has she been doing damage in here, too?" No one answered and Jean gave a quick look about the room, noticing the rummaged drawers, the girls' excited, tragic faces, and the jewelry that Eleanor still had in her hand. Then she made one of her haphazard deductions, whose accuracy was the terror of her enemies and the admiration of her followers.

"Oh, I see--it's more college robber. So our dear Blunderbuss is the thief. I congratulate you, Eleanor, on the beautiful poetic justice of your having been the one to catch her."

"Yes, she's the thief," said Betty, before Eleanor could answer. She had a sudden inspiration that the best way to treat Jean, now that she guessed so much, was to trust her with everything. "And she acts so strangely--she doesn't seem to realize what she has done, and she doesn't care a bit that we know it. She said----" And between them they gave Jean a full account of their interview with Miss Harrison.

Jean listened attentively. "It's a pathetic case, isn't it?" she said at last, with no trace of her mocking manner. "I wonder if she isn't a kleptomaniac."

Betty and Eleanor both looked puzzled and Jean explained the long word.

"It means a person who has an irresistible desire to steal one particular kind of thing, not to use, but just for the sake of taking them, apparently. I heard of a woman once who stole napkins and piled them up in a closet in her house. It's a sort of insanity or very nearly that. Of course jewelry is different from napkins, but Miss Harrison has taken so much more than she can use----"

"Especially so many pearl pins," put in Betty, eagerly. "Haven't you noticed what a lot of those have been lost? She couldn't possibly wear them all."

"Perhaps she meant to sell them," suggested Eleanor.

"But her family are very wealthy," objected Jean. "They spend their summers where Kate does, and she says that they give this girl everything she wants. She never took money either, even when it was lying out in plain sight, and her being so ready to give back the things seems to show that she didn't take them for any special purpose."

"Then if she's a----" began Betty.

"Kleptomaniac," supplied Jean.

"She isn't exactly a thief, is she?"

"No, I suppose not," said Jean doubtfully.

"But she isn't a very safe person to have around," said Eleanor.

"I'll tell you what," said Betty, who had only been awaiting a favorable opening to make her suggestion. "It's too big a question for us to try to settle, isn't it, girls? Let's go and tell Miss Ferris all that we've found out so far, and leave the whole matter in her hands."

Then Jean justified the confidence that Betty had shown in her. "You couldn't do anything better," she said, rising to leave.

"I wish I'd known her well enough to talk things over with her,--not public things like this, I mean, but private ones. Betty, here's a note that Christy Mason asked me to give you. That's what I came in for, originally. Of course this affair of Miss Harrison is yours, not mine, and I shan't mention it again, unless Miss Ferris decides to make it public, as I don't believe she will. By the way, I wonder if you know that Miss Harrison can't graduate with us."

"You mean that she has been caught stealing before?" asked Eleanor.

"Oh, no, but she couldn't make up the French that she flunked at midyears, and she must be behind in other subjects, too. I heard rumors about her having been dropped, and last week I saw the proof of our commencement program. Her name isn't on the diploma list."

"Oh, I believe I'm almost glad of that," said Betty softly. "It's dreadful to be glad that she has failed in every way, but I can't bear to think that she belongs in our cla.s.s."

So it was Miss Ferris who met the Blunderbuss in Eleanor's room that night, who managed the return of the stolen property to its owners, with a suggestion that it would be a favor to the whole college not to say much about its recovery, and she who, finding suddenly that the noise of the campus tired her, spent the rest of the term at Miss Harrison's boarding place on Main Street, where she could watch over the poor girl and minimize the risk of her indulging her fatal mania again while she was at Harding. She was nonchalant over having been caught stealing, but her failure in scholars.h.i.+p had almost broken her heart.

She had worked so hard and so patiently up to the very last minute in the hope of winning her diploma that, on the very morning of the hoop-rolling, she had been granted the privilege of staying on through commencement festivities and so keeping her loss of standing as much as possible to herself. After listening to Betty's and Eleanor's stories and talking to Miss Harrison herself, Miss Ferris was fully convinced that the Blunderbuss was not morally responsible for the thefts she had committed, and so she was unwilling to send her home at once and thus expose her to the double disgrace that her going just then would probably have involved. So she found her hands very full until the girl's mother could be sent for and the sad story broken to her as gently as possible.

It was the one unrelieved tragedy in 19--'s history; there seemed to be absolutely no help for it,--the kindest thing to do was to forget it as soon as possible.

CHAPTER XVII

BITS OF COMMENCEMENT

But Betty Wales couldn't forget it yet. It stood out in the midst of the happy leisure and antic.i.p.ation of senior week like a skeleton at the feast,--a gaunt reminder that even the sheltered little world of college must now and then take its share of the strange and sorrowful problems that loom so much larger in the big world outside. But even so, it had its alleviating circ.u.mstances. One was Miss Ferris's hearty approval of the way in which Betty and Eleanor had managed their discovery, and another was Jean Eastman's unexpected att.i.tude of helpfulness. She a.s.sumed her full share of responsibility, discouraging gossip and speculation about the thefts as earnestly and tactfully as Betty herself, and taking her turn of watching the Blunderbuss at the times when Miss Ferris couldn't follow her without causing too much comment.

Betty and Eleanor tried to accept her help as if they had expected nothing else from her, and Jean for her part made no reference to that phase of the matter except to say once to Betty, "If Eleanor Watson can stand by her I guess I can. Besides you stood by me, and I didn't deserve it any more than this poor thing does. Please subtract it from all the times I've bothered you."

Betty was very generous with the subtraction. She was in a generous mood, wanting to give everybody the benefit of the doubt that, with a good deal of a struggle, she had managed to give Georgia. Of course the vindicating of the little freshman was quite the happiest result of the whole affair. It didn't take Betty long to identify the amethyst pendant as the one article which the Blunderbuss had said she couldn't return; and she was at once relieved and disappointed, on going over the stolen jewelry with Miss Ferris, to find that Nita's pin was certainly missing.

Of course that left room for the possibility that the Blunderbuss had not taken it, and the next thing to do was to consult Georgia and make sure. Betty waited until after dinner that evening for a chance to see her alone and then, unable to stand the suspense any longer, broke abruptly away from her own friends and detached Georgia from a group of tired and disconsolate freshmen sympathizing over examinations.

"Let's go for a walk all by ourselves," she said.

"No fair, running off to talk secrets," Madeline called after the pair.

"Curiosity killed a cat," Betty chanted gaily back at her, leading the way to the back campus.

"It's awfully nice of you to ask me to come, when so many people want you," said Georgia shyly.

"Oh, no, it's not," protested Betty. "I shall have a whole week with the others after you've gone. Besides, there's something I especially want to talk to you about. Let's go and sit on the bank below the observatory."

They found comfortable seats among the gnarled roots of an old elm, where they could look across at Paradise and down on a bed of gorgeous rhododendrons, over which great moths, more marvelously colored than the flowers, flitted lazily in the twilight. Then Betty plunged into the thick of things.

"You remember the pendant that you wore on your chain the night of the Glee Club concert. You said it was a present. Would you mind telling me who gave it to you? I have good reason for asking."

Georgia flushed a little and made the answer that Betty had hoped for.

"The senior Miss Harrison gave it to me last Christmas. I know you and Madeline don't like her, and I don't like her a bit better. But what can you do, Betty, when some one takes a fancy to you? You can't snub her just because she happens to be stupid and unpopular--not if you're a 'Merry Heart,' anyway."

"No," said Betty, "you can't. But if you don't like her you won't feel so bad about what I've got to tell you."

Georgia listened to the story aghast. "But I'm not so dreadfully surprised," she said. "It explains so many things. She started to take Caroline's cla.s.s-pin one day in our room. I supposed she had picked it up without thinking, so when she went away I asked her for it and she acted so funny when she gave it back. And then the way she happened to give me this pin. I went to call on her once last fall, after she had asked me to dinner, and I noticed it s.h.i.+ning under the edge of the carpet. When I called her attention to it she didn't seem to understand, so I picked it up myself. She acted queer then too, and when I admired it and said what a pretty pendant it would make she fairly insisted on my taking it. Of course I wouldn't, but she had it fixed to go on a chain and sent it to me for Christmas." Georgia interrupted herself suddenly. "It was ages after the Glee Club concert before you found out about Miss Harrison. What did you think of me all that time?"

"Why just at first I couldn't understand it," said Betty truthfully, "but after I'd thought it over I was sure you weren't to blame and I've been getting surer and surer all the time. But I am awfully glad to know how it all happened."

"And I am awfully glad that it was you who saw it," said Georgia fervently. "I never wore it but that once. I couldn't make her take it back, so I decided to send it to her after college was over--I knew mother wouldn't want me to take such a valuable present from a girl I knew so slightly, and I thought Miss Harrison would be glad to have it back then. You see," Georgia explained, "I think she did things for me in the hope that I would manage to get her in more with the girls I knew. She has been awfully lonely here, I guess. Well, I felt ashamed of having the pin and ashamed of knowing her, and the things Madeline said about her worried me dreadfully, but I couldn't seem to shake her off.

Why, I've done everything I could, Betty, that wouldn't hurt her feelings. I've fairly lived in other people's rooms, so that she'd never find me at home, and that hurt my poor little roommate's feelings, so the other day I had to tell her what the matter was. I've never told any one else--I hate people who talk about that sort of thing--but I've been just miserable over it,--indeed I have! And now it seems worse than ever." Georgia's big brown eyes filled with tears.

But she smiled again when Betty a.s.sured her that she thought it was much better to be bothered and to have things come out all wrong than to be always thinking just of yourself.

"You see," Georgia confessed, "the first time I met her she seemed nice enough and I accepted her first invitations without thinking, so when she wanted to be intimate I felt as if I had been partly to blame for letting her begin it."

"Yes, you do have to be careful about not being too friendly at first,"