Rhoda Fleming was crossing the hall when they went in, and she turned upon Dorothy with a ready gibe. “It is fine to be you, going out to take tea with county folks, and swanking round generally. The one compensation we stay-at-homes have is that we can get on with our work, while you are doing the social butterfly.”
“Even that compensation will seem rather thin if I can work twice as fast, just because I have been out,” answered Dorothy, smiling back at Rhoda with such radiant good humour that Rhoda was impressed in spite of herself.
“Going out seems to have bucked you up, and I suppose you have had the time of your life,” she said grudgingly. “For my own part, I felt thankful yesterday because the good lady chose to hang round your neck instead of mine, but going to tea with her at the Grand, Ilkestone, puts a different aspect on the affair. I begin to wish she had clawed me instead of you after all.”
“History would have been written differently if she had.” Dorothy’s laugh rippled out as she spoke, but as she went upstairs to the study she wondered what would have happened if Mrs. Wilson had told Rhoda of that wild doing of her father in those days of long ago. Would Rhoda have held the knowledge over her as a whip of knotted cords, or would she have blurted the unpleasant story out to the whole school without loss of time?
What a clamour there would have been! Dorothy shivered as in fancy she heard the wild tale going the round of the school, of how Dr. Sedgewick had been in prison for a fortnight in his reckless youth.
The secret was her own so far. She could hide it until she had time to sort things out in her mind. Meanwhile she would work. Ah, how she would work! She must win that Lamb Bursary. She must! Yet would she dare to keep it?
Hazel Dring, one of the most good-natured of girls, was beginning to grumble. Margaret Prime was beginning to despair. Both of them were so much below Dorothy and Rhoda in the matter of marks that their chances of winning the Mutton Bone grew every week more shadowy.
Sometimes it was Rhoda who was top of the school, more often it was Dorothy. Professor Plimsoll talked with perfect rapture in his tone of the pleasure it was to lecture for the Compton Girls’ School, now that there were such magnificent workers there. Miss Groome was having the time of her life, and even the Head declared that the strenuous work of the Sixth must make its mark on the whole of the school.