it, yet she felt
that it belonged only to those whom it directly concerned.

"Do sit down and behave, Jane," admonished Judith. "You make me nervous.
Your tramp, tramp, tramp gets into my head and I can't study. You act as
though you'd committed a murder and hidden the body in the top drawer of
the chiffonier."

"Excuse me, Judy. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you. I guess the
whole affair has gotten on my nerves."

With this apology, Jane sought a chair and made a half-hearted attempt
at study. Gradually she drew her mind from unpleasant thoughts and
proceeded to concentrate it upon her lessons for the next day.

It was not until she and Judith were preparing for bed that the latter
re-opened the subject.

"Adrienne and I tried a little stunt of our own after dinner to-night,"
she confessed somewhat sheepishly. "Imp went into her room and I stood
outside the door. She read a paragraph out loud from a book, but I
couldn't understand a word she said. I could just catch the sound of her
voice and that was all."

"Humph!" was Jane's sole reply.

"Yes, 'humph' if you want to. It goes to show that the ignoble Noble
never got her information that way. The question is, 'How did she get
it?'"

"I don't know and I don't care," returned Jane wearily. "Please, Judy, I
want to forget the whole thing."

"I don't. I'm going to be an investigating investigator and solve the
mystery. Watch slippery Judy, the dauntless detective of Madison Hall.
Leave it to her to puzzle out the puzzle."

"Better forget it," advised Jane shortly.

"Oh, never! Let me have at least one worthy object in life, won't you?"
was Judith's blithe plea. "Never mind, Imp will support and admire my
ambition, even if you don't."

Judith was not in the least cast down by the defeat of an unworthy foe.
She was glad of it. Brought up among girls, she was too much used to
such squabbles to take them to heart.

For the next three days she and Adrienne amused themselves by planning
wild schemes to entrap the "ignoble Noble" and wring from her a
confession of her nefarious methods. So wild, indeed, were their
projects that the mere discussion of them invariably sent them into
peals of laughter.

As a matter of fact, neither could devise a plausible scheme by which
they might discover what they burned to know. Both were agreed that
chance alone would put them in possession of the much desired
information.

Wednesday evening of the following week s