“What under the sun can she be doing with those?” murmured Dorothy, when she chanced to see them, and touching the pretty bows lightly with her fingers. “Why! Tavia must be going to introduce a new style. Are they ribbon bracelets? How pretty!”
It was the day following the hilarious arrival of “the bad pennies” at Glenwood School, after the railroad bridge had burned and delayed them, and Dorothy herself had met little Celia Moran, the girl from the “Findling.”
Mrs. Pangborn had not yet arrived. She had been delayed by some family difficulty, it was understood, and really, for these first days of the new term, “things were going every which-way,” as Tavia herself declared.
There was a new teacher in charge, too--Miss Olaine. Miss Olaine was tall, and thin, and grim. Tavia declared she looked just like “a sign post on the road to trouble.”
“And you want to be careful you don’t fall under her eye, Tavia,” Cologne had advised. “The girls who have been here through the vacation say she’s a Tartar.”
“Humph!” the headstrong Tavia had declared, “she may be the cream of Tartar, for all I care. I shall take the starch out of her.”
Now, had Dorothy Dale chanced to hear this reckless promise of her chum she might have been more suspicious of the five pretty ribbon bows. Indeed, she would have been suspicious of every particular thing Tavia said, or did.
But, as it chanced, Miss Olaine seemed no more harsh or forbidding to Dorothy than any other teacher. Dorothy was not one to antagonize the teachers, no matter who they might be.
“Five bows,” murmured Dorothy again. “I wonder just what they can be for? Why, they’re too small, I do believe--those rings are--for Tavia’s wrist--or mine.
“Five of them! One for each finger of a hand--one for each of the ‘five senses,’ I declare!--one for each of Jacob Bensell’s young ones who live in the cottage down the road. There’s five of _them_.
“And there’s five cows in Middleton’s pasture--though I don’t suppose Tavia is going to decorate them. And there’s five cunning little pigs in Jake’s pen--he showed them to me last night,” and Dorothy laughed, as she touched the pretty bows again. “I can’t imagine----”
In bounced Tavia herself. “Oh, _you_ here?” she cried, and went right over to the bureau and tumbled the five pretty ribbon bows into her top drawer and shut the drawer quickly.