"Who has drawn this picture on the blackboard?" continued Miss Pitman.
"Hope--Hope did it! It wasn't any of us!" snivelled Irene, trying to thrust the brunt of the affair on to her friend's shoulders.
Miss Pitman gave Hope a scathing glance, under which the girl quailed.
"An extremely clever way of showing her talent for drawing, no doubt," remarked the mistress sarcastically. "I shall be obliged if someone will clean the board."
Several officious hands at once clutched the duster and erased the offending portrait. Miss Pitman walked to her desk, closed the lid, locked it, and put the key in her pocket.
"It is superfluous to tell you what I think of you," she said. "Miss Tempest will have to hear about this."
"Well, Hope's done for with Miss Pitman, at any rate," said Bertha Warren to Addie Parker, when the outraged mistress had taken her departure, and the four sinners had fled downstairs.
"Yes, there'll be no more favouring now--and a good thing, too! It was time Miss Pitman's eyes were opened. Will she really tell Miss Tempest?"
"Serve them right if she does. I'm waiting for developments."
There was not long to wait. At two o'clock, Hope, Blanche, Irene, and Valentine received a summons to the study, and after a ten minutes' interview with the head mistress came away with red eyes.
"Have you heard the news?" said Noëlle Kennedy presently. "There's been a most tremendous storm--a regular blizzard--in the study. Miss Tempest has been ultra-tempestuous, and Hope and the others have come out just wrecks."
"What's the matter?" enquired some of the girls who had not heard of the occurrence in the classroom.
"Hope found Miss Pitman's desk unlocked, and she and Irene and Val and Blanche were calmly turning over the contents when Pittie popped into the room and caught them. Then the squalls began. They had to report themselves in the study, and it turned out that there was something else against Hope and Blanche. I don't know who gave them away, but somebody had been telling Miss Tempest that they were at the wedding that day. She charged them with it, and was simply furious because they hadn't owned up when she asked the class."
"I can tell you who told her," volunteered Margaret Parker. "It was Professor Schenk. He saw them there, and he happened to mention it this morning."