ING 144

ITS COWL FELL BACK, AND DISCLOSED A WELL-KNOWN
AND DECIDEDLY MIRTHFUL COUNTENANCE 200

DIANA CALLED AND SHOUTED TO THEM. THEY TOOK
NO NOTICE 240

A HARUM-SCARUM SCHOOLGIRL

CHAPTER I

A Pixie Girl

"If I'd known!" groaned Winifred Cranston, otherwise Wendy, with a note
of utter tragedy in her usually cheerful voice. "If I'd only known!
D'you think I'd have come trotting back here with my baggage? Not a bit
of it! Nothing in this wide world should have dragged me. I'd have
turned up my hair--yes, it's _quite_ long enough to turn up, Jess Paget,
so you needn't look at it so scornfully; it's as nice as yours, and
nicer! Well, I tell you I'd have turned up my hair, and run away and
joined the 'Waacs' or the 'Wrens', or have driven a motor wagon or
conducted a tramcar, or scrubbed floors at a hospital, or done
anything--_anything_, I say!--rather than stay at the Abbey without Mrs.
Gifford."

"It's pretty stiff, certainly, for the Head to go whisking away like
this," agreed Magsie Wingfield, sitting on the other shaft of the
wheelbarrow. "And without any notice either! It leaves one gasping!"

"Stiff? It's the limit! Why didn't she give us decent warning, instead
of springing it on to us in this sudden fashion? I feel weak!"

"There wasn't time," explained Sadie Sanderson, who, with Violet Gorton
and Tattie Clegg, occupied, in a tight fit, the interior of the
wheelbarrow. "It was all done at a day's notice. Geraldine's been
telling me the whole history."

"Well?"

"Mr. Gifford got suddenly exempted, and was made Governor of some
outlandish place with an unpronounceable name in Burma. He telegraphed
to Mrs. Gifford to join him at Marseilles, and go out with him. So she
went--that's the long and the short of it!"

"Went and left her school behind her," echoed Vi.

"I call it simply running away," commented Wendy. "Why couldn't she have
stopped to arrange things--say till Christmas--and then followed him?"

"It's some tiresome red-tape business at the War Office. They'd give her
a passport to travel out _with_ him, but not to join him afterwards, so
she thought she'd better take the opportunity and go out with him while
she could. It must have been a terrific scramble for her to get off. I
believe she just bundled her things together and bolted, and left the
school to Miss Todd."

"Will sh