"Don't you know who that was out there in the bushes, Nancy?" the school matron asked.
"No, Mrs. Cupp," declared Nan. "Only I know it couldn't be a ghost."
"Yes. He helped you get those things over from Ricolletti's, didn't he?"
"Ye--es," admitted Nan. She feared that the admission might get Walter into trouble.
"It seems to me like a boy's trick," Mrs. Cupp said reflectively. "I should have stopped to see who it was at the time. But I _was_ afraid. My sister and I are in trouble enough as it stands, and I was nervous, I suppose," she added, more to herself than to Nan.
"I'm very sure, Mrs. Cupp, that Walter would not frighten anybody."
"Not if he thought he could save you girls from getting caught?" asked the matron, shrewdly.
"I am quite sure Walter was nowhere near the boathouse at that time," Nan said, with confidence. "I know he telephoned to his sister this evening from their house. Couldn't you call up his mother or father, and find out if he went out again after that time?"
"Good idea! I'll do it," said Mrs. Cupp. "You report to Dr. Prescott to-morrow, after chapel."
This order did not make Nan sleep any more soundly that night. It was quite twelve o'clock when the girls separated under the sharp eye of Mrs. Cupp, and scattered to their rooms. Bess kissed Nan fondly before she crept into her own bed.
"I don't care, Nancy!" she breathed, "we would have had a lovely time if it hadn't been for old Cupp!"
"And the one who set her after us," suggested Nan.
"We'll never know, I s'pose," said Nan. "I thought at first Linda and her crowd had robbed us."
"But I guess whoever did that, scared Mrs. Cupp, too."
"Yes. If you wish to call him that. But he is a ghost with a big appetite."
"Dear me! that's so, isn't it?" agreed Bess. "Well! I--don't--know--ow-oo!" Yawn--sigh--murmur, and Bess was off to the Land of Nod.
Not so Nan. She tossed about for a long time ere she could find oblivion. Her conscience pricked her, and a prickly conscience is just as unhappy a bedfellow as a porcupine would be.
What would "Momsey" and "Papa Sherwood" say if they heard of this escapade? Nan realized that she had done wrong in yielding to the seductive suggestion of the secret supper. She might have given her girl friends a treat in some way that would not have broken the school rules.