"All this is news to me," declared Marjorie, frowning her disapproval. "It must be stopped."
"If necessary, we must have an understanding with our opponents," was the quiet response.
"That is easy enough to say," retorted Susan, "but if we were to accuse those girls of playing unfairly, they would simply laugh at us and call us babies."
"I'd rather be laughed at and called a baby than allow such unfairness to go on." There was a ring of determination in Marjorie's reply.
"Let us hurry on to Muriel and hear her views," suggested Harriet. "She lives next door to Esther Lind, so we can call them together and show them the letter."
Once the team were together they spent an anxious session over the letter left by an unseen hand. Discussion ran rife. With her usual impetuosity Muriel announced her intention of taking Mignon to task before the game. "I'm not afraid of her," she boasted. "I'd rather not play than to feel that at any minute I might be laid up for repairs. I'm much obliged to the one who wrote this. He or she must have had a troubled conscience."
Marjorie cast a startled glance at Muriel. Could it be possible that Mary had written the note? And yet something about the gray stationery had seemed familiar. She was not sure, but she thought she had at some time or other received a letter from her chum written on gray note paper. She resolved to look through Mary's letters to her as soon as she reached home. If Mary had, indeed, sent the warning, it was because she felt constrained to do the only honorable thing in her power. Association with Mignon had not entirely deadened her sense of right and wrong. A wave of love and longing brought the tears to Marjorie's eyes. She winked them back. She must not betray herself to her schoolmates.
"Listen to me, girls," she began earnestly. "We mustn't say a word to our opponents before the game. I know I just said that we ought to have an understanding, and I meant it. But we had better wait until the end of the first half. If everything is all right, then so much the better. If it isn't--well--we shall at least have given them their chance."
The players lingered in the Hardings' living room to discuss the coming contest, go over their signals and prepare themselves as effectually as possible for the fray. It was almost noon when Marjorie sped up the stairs to her room, there to put into execution the search she had decided to make. Mary's letters to her, tied with a bit of blue ribbon, reposed in a pretty lacquered box designed especially to hold them. Marjorie untied the ribbon and fingered them with a sigh of regret for the happy past. Most of them were written on white paper, a few were on pale blue, Mary's color. Almost at the bottom of the box was one gray envelope. The searcher drew a quick breath as she separated it from its fellows. Drawing the envelope from her blouse, she compared the two. They were identical. The mysterious warning was no longer a mystery to her.