Part 23 (1/2)

To which Miss Isabella had replied: ”Well, you know, Robby dear, you really hardly saw her. You had so much to do, poor boy, just when she was here. Her name was Laura--Laura Rambotham.”

And Mrs. Shepherd gently: ”Yes, a nice little girl. But very young for her age. And SO shy.”

”You wretched little lying sneak!”

In vain Laura wept and protested.

”You made me do it. I should never have told a word, if it hadn't been for you.”

This point of view enraged them. ”What? You want to put it on us now, do you? ... you dirty little skunk! To say WE made you tell that pack of lies?--Look here: as long as you stay in this blooming shop, I'll never open my mouth to you again!”

”Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That's all she's fit for. Spreading disgusting stories about people who've been kind to her. They probably only asked her there out of charity. She's as poor as dirt.”

”Wants her bottom smacked--that's what I say!”

Thus Maria, and, with her, Kate Horner.

Tilly was cooler and bitterer. ”I was a dashed fool ever to believe a word. I might have known her little game. She? Why, when I took her out to see my cousin Bob, she couldn't say bo to a goose. He laughed about her afterwards like anything; said she ought to have come in a perambulator, with a nurse.--YOU make anyone in love with you--you!”

And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.

”What have they been saying to you, Laura?” whispered c.h.i.n.ky, pale and frightened. ”Whatever is the matter?”

”Mind your own business and go away,” sobbed Laura.

”I am, I'm going,” said c.h.i.n.ky humbly.--”Oh, Laura, I WISH you had that ring.”

”Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it,” cried Laura, maddened.--And retreating to a lavatory, which was the only private place in the school, she wept her full.

They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain, straightforward, thumping order. What they could not forgive, or get over, was the extraordinary circ.u.mstantiality of the fictions which with she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies with such proficiency meant that you had been born with a criminal bent.--And as a criminal she was accordingly treated.

Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.

”Whyever did you do it?” one of them asked Laura curiously; it was a very pretty girl, called Evelyn, with twinkling brown eyes.

”I don't know,” said Laura abjectly; and this was almost true.

”But I say! ... nasty tarradiddles about people who'd been so nice to you? What made you tell them?”

”I don't KNOW. They just came.”

The girl's eyes smiled. ”Well, I never! Poor little Kiddy,” she said as she turned away.

But this was the only kind word Laura heard. For many and many a night after, she cried herself to sleep.

XIX.

Thus Laura went to Coventry.--Not that the social banishment she now suffered was known by that name. To the majority of the girls Coventry was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said to be made, and where for a better-read few, some one had hung with grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady G.o.diva, which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.

But, by whatever name it was known, Laura's ostracism was complete. She had been sampled, tested, put on one side. And not the softest-hearted could find an excuse for her behaviour.