CHAPTER XVI

RELATING IT ALL

"I won't believe it!" declared Nan Sherwood.

"You saw it with your own eyes!"

"I don't believe my own eyes, then!" was Nan's energetic rejoinder.

"Well, I know I saw it!"

"That doesn't convince me in the least, Bess Harley."

"Well! you are the most obstinate girl!"

"I won't own up to such foolishness!" cried Nan, hotly. "A ghost _just doesn't exist_!"

They were back in their own room at Lakeview Hall. Bess could not have told for the life of her how they had obtained their sweaters out of the locker, put them on, and escaped from the boathouse. But she knew that somehow Nan had kept her from running away in a panic.

"Why, Nan, we _saw_ it!" Bess reiterated.

"Saw what?"

"The ghost."

"We saw nothing of the kind. We saw something."

"Well!"

"But a ghost is nothing. We could not see a spirit. That was something palpable we saw. It crossed in front of two windows and we could not see through it. It had a solid body."

"We--ell," Bess returned. "There may be solid ghosts."

"Doesn't stand to reason. There's supper!"

"I--I don't want supper much," said Bess, shivering.

"We'll go down and ask Susan for hot tea. That's what we need," said practical Nan. "And let's keep still about this."

"About Walter and all?"

"Oh, no! I mean about what we saw at the boathouse."

"Then you do admit we saw something?" cried Bess.

"That's just it," said Nan drily. "We did see something. Therefore it was not a ghost."

Her insistence on this point vexed Bess not a little. She felt that they had seen a strange thing, and she wanted to tell the other girls about it. But what would be the use of doing that if her chum pooh-poohed the idea of a ghost and merely went to Henry, as she threatened to, and told him that some tramp, or other prowler, was hanging about the boathouse?

"For," said Nan, "the girls keep bathing suits and sweaters and all sorts of things down there and that fellow, whoever he is, may be light-fingered."

"Dear me!" grumbled Bess, "you never are romantic."

"Humph! what's romantic about a disembodied spirit? Smells of the tomb!" declared Nan.

There was one thing, however, that had to be told. The canoe was lost and Mrs. Cupp must be informed at once. So after supper the two chums sought that stern lady's room, which was right at the top of the basement stairs.

As Nan and Bess approached this "ogress' castle," as the girls called Mrs. Cupp's room, a tall, thin lady was going in ahead of them. She had on her coat and hat and was evidently a visitor from outside.

"Dear me! who's that?" whispered Nan, to her chum.

"Oh! I know," Bess replied eagerly. "One of the girls pointed her out to me on the street and I never _could_ forget that funny, old-fashioned hat."

"Well!" exclaimed Nan, hanging back, "who is she?"

"Mrs. Cupp's sister. She lives alone in the village. She's a milliner. That's why she wears such an awful hat, I suppose," giggled Bess. "By the same token shoemakers' wives go almost barefoot."

"Hush!" breathed Nan.

The visitor's high-pitched, querulous voice reached their ears plainly, for she had not taken pains to close the door.

"Well, now, Ida, what did I tell you?" she began. "He's back again."

"Goodness! how you startled me, Sadie Vane," was Mrs. Cupp's response. She had evidently been sitting at her desk with her back to the door.

"You'll be more startled, Ida Cupp, when you hear what I have to tell you," Miss Vane went on to say hurriedly.

"Well! do shut the door. You needn't tell it to the whole school, Sadie," said the matron, sharply.

The door banged.

"This is no time for us to interview Mrs. Cupp," said Nan, sensibly, and she and her chum withdrew.

Linda Riggs had confided a garbled account of the boating accident to her particular chum and roommate, Cora Courtney. Of course, Cora eagerly spread the tidings. There was a group of excited girls in the main study when Nan and Bess came through the front hall, ready to pounce on them.

"Hey, sawneys!" ordered Mabel Schiff, a big girl who would graduate from the Hall at the end of the school year. "Come in here and give an account of yourselves."

"Let's not, Nan," whispered Bess, hanging back.

"Come on!" commanded the big girl.

"Why not?" Nan asked her chum. "They've all got to know about it."

"She's a friend of Linda's," Bess again whispered.

"Then we'll find out what Linda has told," Nan said, and boldly entered the room.

"Hullo!" said the big girl. "You don't look much like a couple of drowned rats. They tell me you've been overboard."

"We got wet," admitted Nan, quietly.

"Got wet! Why, you lost your canoe, and were almost drowned, and if it hadn't been for Linda Riggs, you wouldn't have been saved!"

"In spite of her we were saved, is nearer the truth," Nan declared, but without showing any of the warmth that Bess was beginning to display.

"How ridiculous! She saw you and made that Mason boy sail over to you and pick you up, didn't she?"

"No, she didn't!" snapped Bess, quite losing her temper now.

"Oh, of course you kids would say that," scoffed the big girl. "You don't like Linda. But poor Linda was so sick she couldn't come down to supper."

"She was sicker out in that boat," Bess said, with a laugh. "You should have seen her."

"And you can laugh?" groaned Miss Schiff.

"It was no laughing matter for a while," Nan put in, good-naturedly. "We really were in great trouble. Our canoe was lost----"

"You'll have to pay for that, children," Mabel Schiff cried.

"We know all that!" Bess returned smartly. "And our folks are quite as well able to pay for the old thing as Linda's father."

"Oh, hush, Bess!" begged Nan, _sotto voce_. This sort of talk did sound so common!

"I don't care! I'm sick of hearing about Linda's riches," Bess rejoined.

"I suppose you girls think you saved yourselves?" the big girl went on.

"No; we did not," Nan said, with seriousness. "Walter Mason saved us. We would have drowned had it not been for Walter."

"Oh! of course it was his boat----"

"It was Walter himself who did it all," Nan went on, enthusiastically. "He is as brave as he can be." She then related the whole incident, just as it had taken place. The girls listened attentively at last, for the story of the squall and the boating accident that followed it, with the details of the rescue, lost nothing in Nan's telling.

"Great! great!" shouted Laura Polk, when Nan finished. "You ought to be class historian, Nancy Sherwood."

"But how about Linda?" suggested another girl, slily. "She is some historian, too, isn't she?"

Now, Nan had said nothing in her veracious tale about the purse-proud girl; but Mabel Schiff said:

"I don't believe all that. I guess Linda was there as much as these freshies----"

"Yes, she was!" exclaimed Bess, excitedly. "And all she did was to be ill, over the rail of the boat, and scold Walter for making any effort to save us. That's the sort of a girl Linda is."

"That sounds a good deal like her," announced the red-haired girl, bluntly. "Linda Riggs can't pull the wool over our eyes--much! We've all seen enough of her to know pretty much what she would do at such a time."

"You're all jealous of her," sniffed Mabel.

"Sure!" laughed Laura. "We're jealous of her kind disposition, her honey-dripping tongue, and her delightfully social ways."

"And her money!" flashed Mabel.

"I think," said May Winslow, a peace-loving and, withal, ladylike girl--"I think we have discussed an absent fellow-pupil quite enough. Let us say nothing about Linda that we would not say to her."

"Oh, goodness!" cried the impulsive Bess. "I'd say just what I think of her, to her face."

"That would not make it the less ill-natured," said May, quietly.