For the first time, Mademoiselle faced Belinda and the wide-eyed girls. "_Ces chères demoiselles! Cette superbe_ Mees Ryder! Bah! It was too easy. I mention a duchess, a countess. The lofty Mees Ryder falls upon my neck. I tell stories of the French noblemen who have adored me, persecuted me with their devotion until I fled from France; poor but honest. The little schoolgirls gulp it all down and beg for more. Oh, but they are stupid--these respectable people. You have my sympathy, Mademoiselle Carewe. You must live among them. For me--give me _les gens d'esprit_, give me a society interesting. _Adieu, mes chères._ It was amusing, that boarding-school experience, but to endure it long--_mon dieu_, I prefer even this!" She waved her hand airily toward the policeman and the grinning detectives, and, with a shrug, moved toward the shop door, then paused for a parting message. "My regards to the venerable spinsters. It pains me that I shall never be able to arrange for them a meeting with the Duchesse de Rochechouart and Madame la Comtesse de Pourtales. The maid of the duchess collected stationery for me at one time. It is often of use, the stationery that carries a good crest. Adieu!" Belinda convoyed a subdued group of girls back to the school; but, by the time they reached the door, their spirits had soared. It is sad to be disillusioned, but after all it is something to have been intimately associated with a famous criminal, and to have been an eye-witness of her capture. Only Laura May Lee mourned and refused to be comforted. "I will never again open my soul to anyone," she vowed hysterically. "I said the woman was a cat," commented Miss Barnes when the news reached her ears. What Miss Lucilla Ryder said in the first fervor of her surprise no one save Belinda knew, for their interview was behind closed doors, but when she came from her room to meet the detective Miss Lucilla's calm dignity was without a ripple. The investigation of teachers' credentials is now her pet hobby, and she freezes at the mention of the French nobility. CHAPTER V THE BLACK SHEEP'S CHRISTMAS FIVE days before Christmas the school of the Misses Ryder emptied its pupils and teachers into the bosoms of more or less gratified families, and closed its doors for the holiday season. The principals lingered for two days after the girls left, in order to see that the furniture was covered, the furnace fires were allowed to die, the gas was turned off, the shades were decorously drawn, the regular butcher's, baker's and milkman's supplies were stopped. Then they, too, went out into the world, for they always spent Christmas with the old aunt who lived upon the ancestral Ryder acres in New Hampshire.