“Ask Miss Read, Margot!” suggested Gretta. “She’ll tell you if you may!”
“I’m not going to ‘ask’ about such a thing,” said Margot in high dudgeon; “as though I can’t write a letter to my mother, indeed! I’m going straight to that dormitory-place to see if my boxes have gone up. Anyhow, I’ve a post card in my bag; that’ll be better than nothing!” She turned on her heel as she spoke, and ran up the stairs while Gretta looked uneasily after her.
“Come back, you new child!--Margot Fleming, isn’t it?” called the head girl from the tail of the procession, as she caught sight of the flying figure. “It’s against the rules to go to the dormitories now!”
“I don’t believe in rules,” said Margot, turning and speaking emphatically from the top stair, “about silly things like that, I mean. I’m going for a post card, and I’ve simply got to have it.” She turned again, and resumed her upward journey.
“But you don’t mean to say you won’t let me write to mother!” she exclaimed three minutes later--standing with flaming cheeks, a post card clutched in her hand--to Miss Read, who had followed her upstairs, and now gazed at the independent twelve-year-old with a face of undisguised surprise; “because, if so----”
“The school rule is that letters are written home on Sundays,” said the house-mistress. “You have come here to obey the rules, haven’t you? But, unfortunately, you have broken several of them already--mostly without knowing it, of course--and now you want to break _this_ one.”
“I don’t want to break rules,” said Margot passionately, “but I want to keep my promise.”
“And that was----?” asked Miss Read slowly.
“I said to mother as the train was starting, ‘I’m going to write to-night,’ so I must do it. What’s the _sense_ of making a rule like this one of yours; there doesn’t seem any reason!”
“I can quite see that you don’t understand the reason,” said Miss Read, speaking very quietly, “but I’ll try to explain things if you will listen. There are twenty-four boarders here, and if I gave leave to _one_ of them to write a letter, I must naturally give leave to _all_, which means that twenty-four girls would need writing material from boxes that are not yet unpacked. Writing materials are very often at the bottom of people’s trunks, of course, and if twenty-four girls were allowed upstairs to turn over their boxes, and then to leave their trunks again and go down to write letters, what would be the state of the dormitories, and when would the rest of the unpacking and arranging get done?”