But Gladys detained them, saying: “Shall we tell the girls the bad news?”
“Bad news on a day as sparkling as this?” Joy began. Then, as she glanced from one face to another, she exclaimed: “I know what it is! You have heard who has won the poetry contest.”
“Have you really?” This eagerly from Muriel. How she did hope that the prize had been awarded to Joy. But, remembering what Miss Gordon had said, she almost knew the name that she would hear.
“Girls,” Catherine Lambert said emphatically, “I’m just sure that Marianne Carnot is a plagiarist.”
Faith put a warmly gloved hand on the arm of her friend. “That’s a very serious accusation, Cathy. I really do not think that we ought to make it unless we have more evidence than we have at present.”
Catherine whirled about and her dark eyes flashed. “I suppose you’d stand by and see your best friends cheated out of the prize rather than call that snobbish French girl a thief, which she is, of course, if she has copied that poem and presented it as her own.”
“We will have to prove it first, I think,” Faith replied quietly.
But Catherine, who was not at all meek, retorted: “Well, how are we going to prove it? Of course, she is too clever to copy one of Tennyson’s or any other poem with which we are all familiar. Now, I think the way for Miss Gordon to find out the truth of this matter would be to lock Marianne in a classroom and tell her she will have to stay there until she writes another poem of equal merit.”
Gladys laughed. “Poor Marianne! She would be in there for the rest of her natural life, I fear. Genius doesn’t work that way. There was a pupil here two years ago who composed music and said the inspiration came to her at the queerest hours. Once she went to the music room at three o’clock in the morning, and poor Miss Humphrey, who slept just above, was terribly frightened. She thought the music room was haunted. Maybe Marianne is the same way. Maybe she has had the one inspiration of her lifetime.”
The dark eyes of Catherine flashed toward Gladys scornfully. “Since when have you taken to championing Marianne Carnot? Perhaps you would like to be numbered among her friends, and——”
Gladys flushed and was about to retort when Joy laughingly exclaimed: “What a tempest in a teapot we are trying to brew!” Then, more seriously: “If Marianne wins the prize unfairly, her own heart will punish her. Now I suggest that we all take hands and play cartwheel on the ice until the gong rings.”