Completely out of patience with his lawless daughter, Mr. La Salle had left the bank, enraged determination in his eye. He had proceeded directly to Sanford High School, insisting there that Mignon be released from study for the day. With no word of greeting other than a stern, “Wicked, ungrateful girl, I have found you out,” he marched her home with him. Once safely in the confines of his own residence, he let loose on her a torrent of recrimination, half English, half French, that reduced her to the lowest depths of terrified humility. At the end of it, he pronounced doom. “You shall go to a convent school at once. You shall not have the honor to graduate in the same class with the excellent young women you have so shamefully treated. In a convent school, all the time you will be watched. Then, perhaps, you will learn that it pays not to do wrong.”
In vain Mignon wept, pleaded, promised. This time her father was adamant. He sternly forbade her return to Sanford High School and would hardly allow her to leave the house. He visited Miss Archer, stating gloomily to the surprised principal that due to Mignon’s own failings he had decided to remove her from high school and place her in the more strict environment of a convent school. To her kindly proposal that he give his erring daughter another chance, he made emphatic refusal. “She has defied me one time too often,” he declared. “Now she must of a truth be severely punished.”
He wrote a note to the Lookout Club, apologizing for his daughter’s shortcomings, and he also wrote another, much in the same strain, to Marjorie Dean, thanking her for past kindnesses and releasing her from her promise. In the note to Marjorie he stated his unrelenting resolve regarding Mignon. Though she had small reason to feel sympathy for Mignon, nevertheless Marjorie pitied her whole-heartedly. As she solemnly remarked to her captain, it was very hard on Mignon to be snatched from school almost on the very eve of her graduation.
Meanwhile, Mignon was racking her troubled brain for some means of evading the fate her father had thrust upon her. Thus far she had not dared write Rowena and confess that she had been frightened into returning the Lookouts’ money. She had known only too well the weight of her friend’s displeasure even in small matters. Rowena would never forgive her for thus having so easily given in. Urged on by the conviction that no one save Rowena could suggest a way out of her present difficulty, Mignon finally sat down and wrote her a most garbled account of her defeat. She represented herself to be the victim of a deep-laid plot and a much-abused person all around. She ended with a vigorous tirade against her father and appealed desperately to Rowena for help out of her difficulties. Her father was already in communication with the head of the school to which he had decreed she should go, she informed Rowena. “If you are truly my friend,” she wrote, “try to think of some way to help me out of this trouble.”