"The American turkey's losing its top-knot," sniggered Maude tauntingly. "It doesn't soar up aloft like it used to do! Been a little tamed by the British lion!" "If you imagine a turkey to be the crest of the United States, you're a trifle out," said Gipsy scornfully. "I'd take to a pigtail if I were you," tittered Maude. "It only needs one ribbon!" "If you were me, then I suppose I'd be you--and, yes, it might be necessary to change my style of hair-dressing," retorted Gipsy, with a glance at Maude's not too plentiful locks. Some of the girls giggled, and Cassie Bertram murmured: "Rats' tails, not pigtails! Or even mouse tails!" Maude scowled. She had not intended the laugh to be turned against herself. "I wouldn't wear limp, faded red bows at any price," she commented, banging her desk to close the conversation, and stalking from the room. "That Gipsy Latimer's too conceited altogether! I should like to take her down a peg," she confided to Gladys, as the pair walked arm-in-arm round the playground. "Well, so you do, continually!" said Gladys. "That's only by the way. She deserves something more for her American cheek. I'm going to play a trick on her, Gladys. It'll be ever such fun! Listen!" The two girls put their heads together, and laughed as Maude whispered her plan; then they both scuttled up to the empty classroom, and abstracting Gipsy's atlas from her desk, carried it downstairs to the lost-property cupboard, and hid it carefully under a pile of books. "She won't find that in a hurry!" chuckled Maude. "There'll be a fine to-do when she misses it," said Gladys. "People who suffer from 'swelled head' just deserve a little wholesome medicine, to cure them of thinking too much of themselves. Now she's editor of the Magazine, Yankee Doodle's unbearable, to my mind. There are others in the Form who can write stories as well as herself." "Yours about the brigands was lovely!" gushed Gladys obediently. "Well, I don't boast, but I flatter myself it wasn't the worst in the Mag. I don't call it fair that everything should be in the hands of one girl, and she a foreigner, as one might say! I'll talk to you again about this, Gladys, for I've got an idea I mean to exploit later on. Come along now, there's the bell!" That afternoon the Upper Fourth had a lesson with Miss Poppleton on "The Work of our Great Explorers". The class was held in the lecture hall, and each girl was required to bring with her an atlas, a blank book for drawing charts, a notebook, a pencil, and indiarubber. Gipsy's desk was not always a miracle of neatness, but she understood its apparent confusion, and could generally lay her hand in a moment upon anything she wanted. This afternoon, however, she rummaged for her atlas in vain. She turned books and papers over and over in her futile search, till the desk was in a chaotic muddle. "Where's my atlas? Who's had my atlas? It was here yesterday!" she asked agitatedly.