Grace Harlowes Plebe Year at High School | Page 9

Is there any girl who would like to earn a little pocket money? But she must have a sweet, soft voice, like Anne's here."
"Anne would be the very girl herself, Mrs. Gray," suggested Grace. "She reads and recites beautifully."
"You are not sure it would trespass on your time too much, Anne?" observed the wily old lady. "I don't want to impose on you."
Anne's face fairly radiated with happiness. Could those girls possibly guess how much it meant to her to earn a little money! Five dollars was to her an enormous sum, and perhaps she might earn as much as that in time.
"Might I do it?" she exclaimed, beside herself with joy.
Grace turned her face away a moment. She felt almost ashamed of her own comfortable prosperity. And how like Mrs. Gray it was to do a kind thing in that way, as if Anne would be conferring a favor by accepting the position.
"Indeed, you might, my dear. And I feel myself lucky to get the brightest girl in her class, and maybe in Oakdale High School, to come and entertain me twice a week."
CHAPTER IV
THE BLACK MONKS OF ASIA
"Who wants to go nutting?" demanded Grace Harlowe in the basement cloakroom a few afternoons later.
"We do," came a chorus of voices.
"I don't," answered one.
"Don't you like nutting parties, Miriam?" asked Grace.
"She's too old," put in a sophomore. "This is a young people's party, I presume?"
"Well, it's not a sophomore party, at any rate," retorted Nora.
"Ma-ma, ma-ma," cried a number of other sophomores, imitating the cries of a baby.
The freshmen were nettled by the superior attitude of the older class, but they knew better than to say anything more just then.
"Never mind, girls," said Grace in a low voice, after the sophomores had strolled away, "we'll be sophomores ourselves next year. Now, all who want to join the party, meet Nora and Jessica and me at the old Omnibus House at three-thirty. And, above all, don't give the meeting place away."
"Not in a thousand years," said Marian Barber.
It was evident that Miriam Nesbit had hoped to break up the party by declining to go herself. But she was not quite strong enough in the class to divide it utterly, and she went off in a huff, with the secret wish to take revenge on somebody. As she started up Chapel Hill to her home she was joined by one of the sophomore girls, who lived across the street.
"Your plebes are getting away from you, Miriam," exclaimed the older girl in a bantering tone. "You haven't got them well in hand yet. Nutting parties should be left behind for the Grammar School pupils."
"They certainly should," replied Miriam in a disgusted tone. "It's Grace Harlowe who gets up all these foolish children's games. She's nothing but a tomboy, anyhow."
"She's the captain of the basketball team, isn't she?" asked the other dryly.
"Yes," admitted Miriam reluctantly, "but she never would have been if she hadn't brought along all her friends to vote for her."
"Whew-w-w!" whistled the sophomore. "You don't mean to say it wasn't a fair election?"
"Oh, fair enough," said Miriam, "except that I didn't bother to bring any of my special friends, and she did. I don't call that exactly fair."
"Oh, well," consoled the other, "you have a few things coming to you anyway, Miriam. You're at the head of your class, as usual, I suppose?"
Miriam nodded her head without answering. She was thinking of little Anne Pierson and what a close race they were running together. Even studying harder than she had ever had to do before, Miriam found it difficult to keep up with Anne.
"Where are they going?" asked the other girl suddenly, after they had walked along a few minutes in silence.
"Where are who going?" asked Miriam.
"Why, the nutting party, of course."
Here was Miriam's chance for revenge. The sophomores were a famously mischievous class, and this girl was one of its ringleaders. Back in Grammar School days they had played many pranks on their school fellows, and even in their freshman year they had dared to turn off all lights, one night at a dance of older schoolmates.
"If I tell, you won't give me away, will you?" asked Miriam.
"I promise," said the older girl.
"Very well, then. They meet at three-thirty at the Omnibus House on the River road."
"Good," said the sophomore. "Don't you want to come along and see the fun?"
"Don't count on me," answered Miriam, turning in at her gate, with mixed feelings of shame and triumph.
The Omnibus House, which had been chosen by Grace as the class meeting place, was an old stone building standing in the middle of an orchard. It was now in ruins, but tradition set it down as a former inn and stage coach station built before the days of railroads, and finally burned by