"Oh yes, yes!" cried Ulyth, clutching at any straw to excuse her room-mate's conduct. "That's quite likely. Or, Miss Bowes, I've been thinking that perhaps it was a queer kind of loyalty to me. You know Rona's very fond of me, and she was quite absurdly angry because Stephanie's pendant was to go to the exhibition and not mine. She may have changed them, hoping it wouldn't be noticed and that mine would be packed up, and perhaps she intended to put Stephanie's back in the studio when the parcel had safely gone. Rona does such impulsive things."
"I wish I could think so. Unfortunately the other circumstances lend suspicion to a graver motive."
Ulyth walked from the study feeling that she had told far more than she wished.
"I've given Rona away," she said to herself. "Miss Bowes is thinking the very worst of her, I know. Oh dear! I wish she'd explain, and not keep up this dreadful silence. It's so unlike her. She's generally almost too ready to talk. If I could see her even for a few minutes I believe she would tell me. Perhaps Miss Teddington frightened her. Poor Rona! She must be so utterly miserable. Could I possibly get a word with her, I wonder?"
"If I ask Miss Bowes, she'll probably say no," lamented Ulyth.
"Then I shouldn't ask," returned Lizzie. "We've not been definitely forbidden to see Rona."
"You've only to climb out of the linen-room window on to the roof of the veranda."
"Why, so I could. Oh, I must speak to her!"
"I think you are justified, if you can get anything out of her. She'd tell you better than anybody else in the whole school."
"I'll stand in the garden below and shout 'Cave!' if I hear anyone coming."
To help her unfortunate room-mate seemed the first consideration to Ulyth, and she thought the end certainly justified the means. She waited until after the tea interval, when most of the girls would be playing tennis or walking in the glade; then, making sure that Lizzie was watching in the garden below, she stole upstairs to the linen-room. It was quite easy to drop from the window on to the top of the veranda, and not very difficult, in spite of the slope, to walk along to the end of the roof. Here an angle of the old part of the house jutted out, and the open window of Rona's prison faced her only a couple of yards away. She could not reach across the gap, but conversation would be perfectly possible.