Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/131

 “No,” said Emily resentfully, sensing something fearfully wrong somewhere.

“I—think—I would look—now—if I were—you.”’ Mr. Scoville seemed to be speaking with difficulty.

Emily got up and went back to the girls’ dressing-room. She met Principal Hardy in the Hall and Principal Hardy stared at her. Why Principal Hardy stared—why the Preps had laughed—Emily understood when she confronted the dressing-room looking-glass.

Drawn skilfully and blackly across her upper lip and her cheeks was a moustache—a flamboyant, very black moustache, with fantastically curled ends. For a moment Emily gaped at herself in blank horror—why—what— had done it?

She whirled furiously about. Evelyn Blake had just entered the room.

“—you did this!” panted Emily.

Evelyn stared for a moment—then went off into a peal of laughter.

“Emily Starr! You look like a nightmare. Do you mean to tell me you went into class with on your face?”

Emily clenched her hands.

“ did it,” she said again.

Evelyn drew herself up very haughtily.

“Really, Miss Starr, I hope you don’t think I’d to such a trick. I suppose your dear friend Ilse thought she’d play a joke on you—she was chuckling over something when she came in a few minutes ago.”

“Ilse never did it,’ cried Emily.

Evelyn shrugged her shoulders.

“I’d wash it off first and find out who did it afterward,” she said with a twitching face as she went out.

Emily, trembling from head to foot with anger, shame and the most intense humiliation she had ever suffered, washed the moustache off her face. Her first impulse was to go home—she could not face that roomful of Preps again. Then she set her teeth and went back, hold-