"I know. It's all blown over and forgotten, when up it pops again. 'Murder will out,' they say. But you girls only murdered a few strawberries. It looks to me," added Neale O'Neil, "as though somebody was trying to get square."
"Get square with _whom_?" demanded Agnes.
"I suppose so. But Trix and some of the others picked and ate quite as many berries as we did. The girls that went over to Fleeting to root for us were all in it, too."
"I know," Neale said. "If the farmer had been sure who you were, or any of the electric car men had told---- Had the car all to yourselves, didn't you?"
"We girls were the only passengers," said Agnes.
"Then make up your mind to it," the wise Neale rejoined, "that if Mr. Marks has only recently been told of the raid, some girl has been blabbing. The farmer or the conductor or the motorman would have told at once. They wouldn't have waited until three months and more had passed."
"It looks just like a mean girl's trick. Some telltale," returned the boy, in disgust.
"Trix Severn might do it, I s'pose, because she doesn't like me any more."
"You remember what Mr. Marks told us all last spring when we grammar grade fellows were let into the high school athletics? He said that one's conduct outside of school would govern the amount of latitude he would allow us in school athletics. I guess he meant you girls, too."
"He's an awfully strict old thing!" complained Agnes.
"They tell me," pursued Neale O'Neil, "that once a part of the baseball nine played hookey to go swimming at Ryer's Ford, and Mr. Marks immediately forfeited all the games in the Inter-scholastic League for that year, and so punished the whole school."
"I don't know whether it is or not. But I know the baseball captain this year was mighty strict with us fellows."
The topic of the promised punishment of the basket ball team for an old offense was discussed almost as much at the Corner House that evening as was the "lady in gray" and the sovereigns of England.
Tess kept these last subjects alive, for she was studying the rhyme and would try to recite it to everybody that would listen--including Linda, who scarcely understood ten words of English, and Sandyface and her family, gathered for their supper in the woodshed. Tess was troubled about the closing of the Women's and Children's Hospital, because of its effect upon Mrs. Eland, too.