She was aiding the heartless throng, but did not know it.  It would have never entered Heavy’s mind to do a really mean thing.

Ann untied the narrow red ribbon.  She raised the cover.  Tissue paper covered something very choice——?

A dunce cap.

For a moment Ann was stricken motionless.  The girls about her shouted.  One coarse, thoughtless girl seized the cap, pulled it from the box, and clapped it on Ann Hicks’s black hair.

The delighted crowd shouted more shrilly.  Heavy was thunderstruck.  Then she sputtered: 

“Well!  I never would have believed there was anybody so mean as that in the whole of Briarwood School.”

But Ann, who had held in her temper as she governed a half-wild pony on the range, until this point, suddenly “let go all holts,” as Bill Hicks would have expressed it.

She tore the cap from her head and stamped upon it and the fancy box it had come in.  She struck right and left at the laughing, scornful faces of the girls who had so baited her.

Had it not been disgraceful, one might have been delighted with the change in the expression of those faces—­and in the rapidity with which the change came about.

More than one blow landed fairly.  The print of Ann’s fingers was impressed in red upon the cheeks of those nearest to her.  They ran screaming—­some laughing, some angry.

Heavy’s weight (for the fleshy girl had seized Ann about the waist) was all that made the enraged girl give over her pursuit of her tormentors.  Fortunately, Ruth herself came running to the spot.  She got Ann away and sat by her all the afternoon in their room, making up her own delinquent lessons afterward.

But the affair could not be passed over without comment.  Some of the girls had reported Ann’s actions.  Of course, such a disgraceful thing as a girl slapping another was seldom heard of in Briarwood.  Mrs. Tellingham, who knew very well where the blame lay, dared not let the matter go without punishing Ann, however.

“I am grieved that one of our girls—­a young lady in the junior grade—­should so forget herself,” said the principal.  “Whatever may have been the temptation, such an exhibition of temper cannot be allowed.  I am sure she will not yield to it again; nor shall I pass leniently over the person who may again be the cause of Ann Hicks losing her temper.”

This seemed to Ann to be “the last straw.”  “She might have better put me in the primary grade in the beginning,” the ranch girl said, spitefully.  “Then I wouldn’t have been among those who despise me.  I hate them all!  I’ll just get away from here——­”

But the thought of running away a second time rather troubled her.  She had worried her uncle greatly the first time she had done so.  Now he was sure she was in such good hands that she wouldn’t wish to run away.

Ann knew that she could not blame Ruth Fielding, and the other girls who were always kind to her.  She merely shrank from being with them, when they knew so much more than she did.