hat I'm German--" she began. But Phyllis
interrupted her.

"I'm not implying anything!" she said. "If your guilty conscience
makes you imagine things--well, that's not _my_ fault, is it? Come on,
Dorothy, there's the dinner bell." And she made haste to escape from
the sitting-room before Geraldine could pin her down to anything more
than a vague aspersion.

"But, of course, she _is_ German," she argued that afternoon to a
select gathering of the Lower Fifth. "Everything points to it. She
said she lived in Germany when she was little. I expect her mother was
a German, if the truth were only known. And then her
_sneakiness_--that's German, if you like!"

"I don't see that she is so very sneaky," protested Jack, who was
still, in spite of her disappointment over the hockey team and her
general acquiescence in the form's treatment of Geraldine, somewhat
prepossessed in favour of the new girl, to whom she had taken an
immense liking on the first evening of the term. "It really wasn't her
fault that I made that caricature. And though, of course, she might
have hidden the paper out of the way when she heard Miss Parrot coming,
yet she was only a new girl--and perhaps she _really_ didn't know."

"Oh, of course--if you're going to take her part----" said Phyllis in
such a deprecating tone that Jack made haste to capitulate.

"I wasn't taking her part exactly. I was only pointing out that it
seemed a little hard on her to be blamed for that caricature affair."

"And what about you?" demanded Phyllis. "Wasn't it hard on _you_ to
have to miss the hockey trial and still be down in B.1 when you might
have been in the second eleven? You can sympathise with the new girl
if you like. For my part, I think she got off very lightly. Why, most
schools would have sent her to Coventry for doing a thing like
that--especially when they found out that she was a German!"

"But even if she is a German--and I must say she doesn't look a bit
like one; Germans are usually so big and fair and fat, and Geraldine's
dark and thin--but even if she is, the war's over now, so I don't see
that there's any actual harm in that," remarked Hilda Burns.

"I don't agree with you," said Phyllis darkly. "There _mayn't_ be any
harm in it, of course--I don't say that there is. But all the same it
isn't nice to think that one is actually at the same school with a
German girl--even though the war is over!"

"But _why_? They're not our enemies