Cissie rescued the fragments afterwards, and pieced them together, and when she discovered the addition which had been made, her wrath and indignation knew no bounds. As for Patty, she was nearly heart-broken at the affair. She genuinely liked Miss Rowe, and could not bear her to think that she would have been so cruel and indelicate as to call attention to her one blemish. Even Vera was penitent, for though she had had the bad taste to alter the drawing, she certainly had not intended it to fall into the hands of the mistress herself. The hard part of it was that no one liked to explain, because to refer to it at all would only have seemed to make matters worse; so the girls consoled Patty as best they could, but it was a long time before she could get over it. Perhaps on the whole the occurrence made Vera a little less nasty to Patty. She was a proud, but not altogether an ungenerous girl, and she was genuinely sorry to have thus thrown blame on undeserving shoulders. But for Muriel's influence she would have been almost ready to follow the example of Kitty and Maud, and if not to make friends, at least to treat with tolerance a companion who was so particularly inoffensive, and so willing to meet an apology halfway. The war which Patty waged in her bedroom still went on as before. Every night one of her companions would relight the gas, in spite of all entreaties. Sometimes Patty would get up and turn it out, greatly to the wrath of the others, who would retaliate next day by hiding her brush and comb, or dropping her cake of soap into her water jug. It was a most unpleasant state of affairs, and seemed likely to continue indefinitely, when an incident fortunately happened which led to a truce.