"One night last spring she let herself down from the dormitory with a rope ladder and went--well, I don't know where she went, but she got back safely enough----" "Up the ladder?" "No. That was the wonderful part. She simply waited till morning and when the gates were open slipped in in time for chapel." The girls were rather horrified at this story. "It's shocking," the chorus exclaimed. "It does sound so," went on Edith impressively, "if I didn't happen to know that she spent the night with good old Mrs. Murphy, who told it to me herself one day in a burst of tea-cup confidence, and I never let it out to any one but Katherine until to-day. But it does seem the moment for telling it, if she did play that dastardly trick----" "But we aren't sure it was Anne White," put in Molly. "No, but it's her style. She sent a girl a live mouse through the mail and she broke up one of the sophomore class meetings by putting ticktacks on the window." "How silly," ejaculated Mabel Hinton. "But what was she doing down on the campus and what did Mrs. Murphy think of being waked up at midnight?" asked Judy. "It wasn't midnight. It was only a little before eleven and Anne told Mrs. Murphy she had done it for a lark. She was awfully frightened and Mrs. Murphy began by being shocked and ended by being kind-hearted. The ladder had slipped down and she couldn't get up and she didn't know what to do." So it happened, that without meaning to be unjust, the seniors secretly blamed Anne White for the pillaging of their lunch hampers. But there was no evidence and they could only wait and be watchful, as Margaret expressed it. CHAPTER VI. THE RETORT COURTEOUS. Because of the happy ending of the Ramble the seniors made no secret of the theft of the lunch hampers. If they had been obliged to go hungry, they would probably have kept the entire story to themselves. Such is human nature. When the story reached Miss Walker's ears, as most things about Wellington did sooner or later, she sent for Margaret Wakefield and got the history of the case from her in an exceedingly dramatic and well connected form. "And we had gone to no end of trouble, Miss Walker, and a good deal of expense," Margaret finished. "Lots of us had had cakes and pickles and things sent on from home." Miss Walker smiled. She could have named the contents of those hampers without any outside assistance. "What none of us understands is where they took the hampers afterward. They couldn't have brought them back to college without being found out."