"Have you said anything to Catherine or Helen?"

"No, and I don't want to. It's very unfortunate, but they've really got
no tact. Catherine's so high-handed, and Helen's nearly as bad. They
snap the girls up for the least trifle. The result is the juniors have
got it into their tiresome young heads that monitresses are a species of
teacher. They weren't intended to be that at all. A monitress is just
one of ourselves, only with authority that we all allow. She ought to be
jolly with everybody."

"Um! You can hardly call Catherine jolly with the kids."

"That's just it. They resent it; they've gone their own way lately, and
it's been decidedly downhill. I'm persuaded they're playing some deep
and surreptitious game at present. I wish I knew what it was."

"Can't Rona tell you?"

"I wouldn't pump Rona for the world. It's most frightfully difficult for
her, a junior, to be room-mate with a senior. Her form always suspect
her of giving them away to the Upper School. Rona's had a hard enough
struggle to get any footing at all at The Woodlands, and I don't want to
make it any harder for her. If she once gets the reputation of
'tell-tale' she's done for. Since Stephanie made that fuss about juniors
coming into senior rooms I mayn't ask her into V B; so if she's
ostracized by her own form too she'll be neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor
good red herring. No; however I find out it mustn't be through Rona."

"Yes, I quite see your point. Now you speak of it, I believe those
juniors are up to something. There's a prodigious amount of whispering
and sniggering among them. 'What's the joke?' I said to Tootie Phillips
yesterday, and she flared out in the most truculent manner: 'That's our
own business, thank you!'"

"Tootie has been making herself most objectionable lately. She wants
sitting upon."

"Catherine will do that, never fear."

"No doubt, but it doesn't bring us any nearer finding out what those
juniors are after."

"They vanish mysteriously after tea sometimes. I vote we watch them, and
next time it happens we'll stalk them."

"Right-O! But not a word to anybody else, or it might get about and put
them on their guard."

"Trust me! I wouldn't even flicker an eyelid."

Now that Ulyth and Lizzie had compared notes on the subject of the
juniors, they became more convinced than ever of the fact that something
surreptitious was going on. Nods, hints, words which apparently bore a
hidden meaning, nudges, and signs