"You'll be more startled, Ida Cupp, when you hear what I have to tell you," Miss Vane went on to say hurriedly.
"Well! do shut the door. You needn't tell it to the whole school, Sadie," said the matron, sharply.
"This is no time for us to interview Mrs. Cupp," said Nan, sensibly, and she and her chum withdrew.
Linda Riggs had confided a garbled account of the boating accident to her particular chum and roommate, Cora Courtney. Of course, Cora eagerly spread the tidings. There was a group of excited girls in the main study when Nan and Bess came through the front hall, ready to pounce on them.
"Hey, sawneys!" ordered Mabel Schiff, a big girl who would graduate from the Hall at the end of the school year. "Come in here and give an account of yourselves."
"Let's not, Nan," whispered Bess, hanging back.
"Why not?" Nan asked her chum. "They've all got to know about it."
"She's a friend of Linda's," Bess again whispered.
"Then we'll find out what Linda has told," Nan said, and boldly entered the room.
"Hullo!" said the big girl. "You don't look much like a couple of drowned rats. They tell me you've been overboard."
"Got wet! Why, you lost your canoe, and were almost drowned, and if it hadn't been for Linda Riggs, you wouldn't have been saved!"
"In spite of her we were saved, is nearer the truth," Nan declared, but without showing any of the warmth that Bess was beginning to display.
"How ridiculous! She saw you and made that Mason boy sail over to you and pick you up, didn't she?"
"No, she didn't!" snapped Bess, quite losing her temper now.
"Oh, of course you kids would say that," scoffed the big girl. "You don't like Linda. But poor Linda was so sick she couldn't come down to supper."
"She was sicker out in that boat," Bess said, with a laugh. "You should have seen her."
"And you can laugh?" groaned Miss Schiff.
"It was no laughing matter for a while," Nan put in, good-naturedly. "We really were in great trouble. Our canoe was lost----"
"You'll have to pay for that, children," Mabel Schiff cried.
"We know all that!" Bess returned smartly. "And our folks are quite as well able to pay for the old thing as Linda's father."
"Oh, hush, Bess!" begged Nan, _sotto voce_. This sort of talk did sound so common!