Page:Angela Brazil--the leader of the lower school.djvu/237

Rh "I must question Daisy Scatcherd at once," she remarked peremptorily. "I can't understand how the letter came to be in her pocket at all."

The luckless Daisy, subjected to a searching examination, could at first render no account of how she came to be mixed up in the affair. Then little by little a vague remembrance returned to her, and she began dimly to recall the circumstances.

"It must have been on my birthday," she faltered. "I have a kind of recollection that I stopped the postman in the drive, and he gave me several letters. But indeed I never noticed one for Gipsy! If I even looked at the name, I didn't take it in properly. I suppose I only saw it wasn't for me, and stuffed it in my pocket while I opened my own letters. Then I utterly forgot all about it."

"It must be a warning to you, Daisy, against carelessness—a warning to last you the rest of your life," said Miss Poppleton, relieving her feelings by improving the occasion. "Your thoughtless act has had the most unfortunate consequences. It's no use crying now" (as Daisy dissolved into tears). "You can't mend matters. But I hope you'll take this to heart, and be more careful in future."

"If we could only find that poor, unfortunate child, Gipsy," sobbed Miss Edith, when the weeping Daisy had taken her departure. "I always said perhaps her father wasn't an adventurer after all. I think you were too hard on her, Dorothea—too hard altogether!" Which, was the nearest approach to insubordination that Miss Edith, in all her years of meek subserviency to her sister, had ever yet dared to venture upon.