CHAPTER XXIII--THE UNVEILING OF HESTER

"There was a girl in Central High And she was wondrous wise, When she wasn't rigging thunderstorms She was making strawberry pies!

"Gee, Laura! those tarts smell delicious! Do give a feller one?"

Black Jinny, the Belding's cook, chuckled inordinately--as she always did whenever Bobby Hargrew showed her face at the Belding's kitchen window, and shuffled two of the still warm dainties onto a plate and passed them with a fork to the visitor.

"Now, Jinny, you'll spoil the count. And Bobby's getting in in advance of the other girls. These are for my party to-morrow afternoon," complained Laura, but with a smile for the smaller girl.

"Party! Yum, yum!" said Bobby, with her mouth full. "I just love parties, Laura. 'Specially your kind. You always have something good to eat."

"But you'll eat your share of the tarts now."

"I am no South American or Cuban. There is no 'manana.' To-morrow never comes. 'Make hay while the sun shines.' 'Never put off until to-morrow,' and so forth. Oh, I'm full of old saws."

"I'm glad," said Laura. "Then there will not be so much of you to fill up with goodies."

"But it's my mind that's full of saws--not my 'tummy.'"

"Same thing, I believe, in your case," declared Laura, laughing. "Jinny says the way to the boys' hearts is through their stomachs; and I think your mind has a very close connection with your digestive apparatus."

"I believe it. They tell me that eating fish is good for the brain, so all brains must be in close juxtaposition to people's stomachs."

"Wha's dat 'juxypotation,' chile?" demanded Jinny, rolling her eyes. "I never heerd the like of sech big wo'ds as you young ladies talks. _Is_ dere seech a wo'd as 'juxypotation?'"

"There is not, Jinny," chuckled Laura. "She's fooling you."

"I knowed she was," said the cook, showing all her white teeth in the broadest kind of a smile. "I be'lieb de men wot makes dictionaries oughtn't to put in 'em no wo'ds longer dan two syllabubs."

"Great!" crowed Bobby, and then choked over a mouthful of Laura's flaky pie crust.

"Come out on the side porch," said Laura, her face quite flushed. "I've baked my complexion as well as the pies."

"Your cheeks are as red as Lily Pendleton's were last Tuesday at school. Did you hear what Gee Gee did to her?" asked Bobby.

"No."

"Real mean of Gee Gee," chuckled Bobby, as the girls took comfortable seats. "But Lily deserved it."

"Tell me--Gossip!" said Laura.

Bobby merely made a grimace at her and finished the last crumb of pie.

"It was chemistry class. We had done simple tricks and Gee Gee had explained the 'wheres and whereofs' in her most lucid manner. Lily had laid it on pretty thick that day."

"Laid what on?" demanded Laura.

"What she puts on her cheeks sometimes. You know, it isn't a rush of blood to her head that gives her that delicate cerise flush once in a while. I think she tries to emulate Hester Grimes's cabbage-rose cheeks. However, Gee Gee came close enough to her to behold the 'painted Lily's' cheeks. Wow! Gee was mad!" exclaimed the irrepressible. "You know she's as near-sighted as she can be--glasses and all. But this time she spotted Lily.

"She comes up carefully behind her, with a clean damp sponge in her hand.

"'Young ladies,' says she, 'we will have one other experiment before excusing you to your next class. Notice that!' and she gave one dab of the sponge to Lily's right cheek. You never saw a girl change color so suddenly!" giggled Bobby. "And only on one side!"

"Don't you come into _my_ class, Miss, without washing your face, another time!" exclaims Gee Gee. And you can bet she meant it. And Lily carefully removed all the 'penny blush' before she went back to recitation again.

"Foolish girl," said Laura, softly.

"Nothing but a miracle will ever give that girl a natural blush," declared Bobby, reflectively. "You might work it on her, Laura."

"How do you mean?"

"Aren't you a miracle worker?" laughed Bobby.

"I guess not."

"I hear you are. Colonel Swayne's telling all over town what a head you have got! You certainly have got him going, Laura----"

"Sh! You talk worse slang than Chet. Don't let mother hear you."

"I learned part of it from Chet," declared Bobby, unblushingly. "But that was certainly a great scheme about the stage thunderstorm. Some folks laughed and said it was all nonsense. But Nellie's father says it was all right. And the Colonel has worked it himself once since, and Mrs. Kerrick has got the habit of sleeping at night now, instead of trying to do so in the afternoon, as she used."

"Well, she's not complaining about us girls making a noise in the field--that's one good thing," said Laura, with a sigh of genuine satisfaction.

"Lucky she is not. Think of the racket there will be there next Friday afternoon. But, oh! I can only be there as a spectator," groaned Bobby.

"Bobby, dear," said Laura. "I wish I really was a magician--or something like that. A prophetess would do, I guess--a seeress. Then I could explain the mystery of the fire in Mr. Sharp's office and your troubles--for the time being, at least--would be over."

"There's the hateful cat that made me all the trouble!" exclaimed Bobby, suddenly, shaking her clenched fist.

Laura peered around the vines which screened the porch and saw Hester Grimes climbing into an automobile, which was standing before the gate of the butcher's premises.

"She _did_ testify against you," sighed Laura. "But there really was a fire."

"Just the same, if Hester hadn't said she saw me throw something into the basket, Gee Gee would never have put it up to the principal so strong."

Hester was evidently waiting for her mother to appear from the house. They were probably going shopping. Before Laura spoke again she and Bobby heard--as did everybody else who might be listening on the block--Mrs. Grimes shouting to Hester from an upper window:

"Hes! have you seen my veil?"

"No, Ma," replied Miss Grimes.

"My ecru veil--you know, the big one--the automobile veil?"

"I haven't got it, Ma," shouted back Hester.

Laura leaped to her feet.

"What's the matter, Laura?" demanded Bobby.

"Wait a minute, Bobby," whispered the older girl.

"Where are you going?"

"I've got an errand to do," said Laura, evasively, and darted into the house.

She ran up to her room, seized something from a bureau drawer, stuffed it behind the bib of her big apron, and ran down the front stairway and out of the house by that door.

The Grimes's car was still waiting. Mrs. Grimes--a much overdressed woman with the same natural bloom on her coarse face that Hester possessed--was just coming out of the house.

Laura darted down the walk out at the gate. She flew up the street and reached the automobile before Mrs. Grimes had stepped in. That lady was saying to her daughter:

"Hester! I 'most know you took that veil and lost it. You took it the night you went car-riding alone. You remember? When you said you had been as far as Robinson's picnic grounds----"

"Oh, Mrs. Grimes!" gasped Laura, "is this your veil?"

She flashed before the eyes of Hester and her mother the veil that had been used to gag her when she was overcome by the "ghost" in the haunted house in Robinson's Woods.

"No! That isn't her veil," declared Hester, quickly, but growing redder in the face than Nature, even, had intended her to be. "She never saw that veil before."

"Why, hold on, child!" exclaimed Mrs. Grimes. "That looks like mine."

"No, it isn't!" snapped her daughter.

"Yes it is, Hes," said Mrs. Grimes, and she took the proffered veil from Laura's hand.

"'Taint, either, Ma!" cried Hester.

"I hope I know my own veil, Hessie Grimes. This is it. Where did you find it, Laura?" asked the butcher's wife.

"I found it where Hester left it," said Laura, quietly, and looking straight into the other girl's face. "It was the night the M. O. R.'s went to Robinson's Woods."

"There! what did I tell you, Hes?" exclaimed the unsuspecting lady. "I knew you lost it that night. I'm a thousand times obliged, Laura. I don't suppose you would have known it was mine if you hadn't heard me hollering about it?" and she laughed, comfortably. "I _do_ shout, that's a fact. But Laws! it got me back my veil this time, didn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Laura, unsmilingly. "And Hester! Monday morning Miss Carrington will want to speak to you before school."

She turned back without any further explanation to the culprit. She knew that she could make this unveiling of Hester's meanness do Bobby Hargrew a good turn. Hester must admit to Miss Carrington that she had told a falsehood when she said she saw Bobby throw something in the principal's wastebasket. If Hester would not make this reparation Laura was determined to make public what Hester had done to her in the haunted house.