Page:Angela Brazil--the leader of the lower school.djvu/220

208 Helen shrugged her shoulders.

"Miss Poppleton says you're as obstinate as a mule, and she's about right!" she remarked tartly, as she banged the door and locked it noisily behind her. Gipsy was not hungry, so the plentiful supply of meat and vegetables was quite sufficient for her needs, and the lack of pudding was no grievance. Helen's severe censure hurt her desperately. Had the girls all condemned her equally without fair trial, and without sifting the evidence against her? Did Hetty, and Dilys, and Meg, and Lennie, her own particular friends, consider her guilty? Had they no better belief in her honour than that? Had everybody forsaken her? Gipsy pushed her half-finished plateful aside. She was choking too much with sobs to swallow another morsel.

"There isn't a single soul here who cares! I shall have to go away and find Dad!" she exploded in a kind of desperation, standing up and scrubbing her eyes with her wet pocket-handkerchief.

In the meantime Gipsy's friends had not altogether abandoned her, as she supposed. They had been on the alert all the morning to discover some means of communicating with her, though, owing to Miss Poppleton's vigilance, their efforts had so far met with ill success. Any girl found loitering in the vicinity of the passage that led to the dressing-room had been packed off in a most summary fashion, with a warning not to show herself there again under penalty of an imposition. After dinner, however, Meg, who had secret plans of her own, managed to dodge Miss Lindsay, and by creeping under the laurels in the plantation