The McCurdys did not keep house,
preferring to board. They could find no room for Mrs. Jaynes, until it
was remembered that there was an unassigned dormitory room at Dare Hall.

Many of the girls had gone home over the brief holidays; but our three
friends from Briarwood had remained at Ardmore.

So Ruth and Helen and Jennie Stone chanced to be among the girls present
when the housekeeper of Dare Hall came into the sitting-room and, to
quote Jennie, informed them that they must "vamoose the ranch."

"That is what Ann Hicks would call it," Jennie said, defending her
language when taken to task for it. "We've just got to get out--and it's
a mean shame."

Dr. McCurdy was one of the important members of the faculty. Of course,
the girls on that corridor had no real right to the extra room. All they
could do was to voice their disappointment--and they did that, one may
be sure, with vociferation.

"And just when we had come to be so comfortably fixed here," groaned
one, when the housekeeper had departed. "I know I shall dis-_like_ that
Mrs. Jaynes extremely."

"We won't speak to her!" cried Helen, in a somewhat vixenish tone.

"Maybe she won't care if we don't," laughed Ruth.

But it was no laughing matter, as they all felt. They made a gloomy
party in the pretty sitting-room that last evening of its occupancy as a
community resort.

"There's Clara Mayberry in her rocker again on that squeaky board,"
Rebecca Frayne remarked. "I hope she rocks on that board every evening
over this woman's head who has turned us out."

"Let's all hope so," murmured Helen.

Jennie Stone suddenly sat upright in the rocker she was occupying, but
continued to glare at the ceiling. A board in the floor of the room
above had frequently annoyed them before. Clara Mayberry sometimes
forgot and placed her rocker on that particular spot.

"If--if she had to listen to that long," gasped Jennie suddenly, "she
would go crazy. She's just that kind of nervous female. I saw her at
chapel this morning."

"But even Clara couldn't stand the squeak of that board long," Ruth
observed, smiling.

Without another word Jennie left the room. She came back later, so full
of mystery, as Helen declared, that she seemed on the verge of bursting.

However, Jennie refused to explain herself in any particular; but the
board in Clara Mayberry's room did not squeak again that evening.

CHAPTER XIX

A DEEP, DARK PLOT

"Heavy is actually losing fles