“And if that’s so,” Helen said, almost in tears, “poor Ruth will be quarantined for weeks.”

“Why, Helen, how will she graduate?” gasped Lluella.

“She won’t!  She can’t!” declared Ruth’s chum.  “It will be dreadful!”

“I say!” cried Jennie, thoroughly alarmed.  “We musn’t let her stay there and nurse that young one.  Why! what ever would we do if Ruthie Fielding didn’t graduate?”

“The class would be without a head,” declared Mercy.

“It would be without a heart, at least—­and a great, big one overflowing with love and tenderness,” cried Nettie Parsons, wiping her eyes.

“I don’t want any more breakfast,” said Jennie, pushing her plate away.  “Don’t talk like that, Nettie.  You’ll get me to crying too.  And that always spoils my digestion.”

“If Ruth isn’t with us when we get our diplomas, I’m sure I don’t want any!” exclaimed Mary Cox.  And she meant it, too.  Mary Cox believed that she owed her brother’s life to Ruth Fielding, and although she was not naturally a demonstrative girl, there was nobody at Briarwood Hall who admired the girl of the Red Mill more than Mary.

In fact, the threat of disaster to Ruth’s graduation plans cast a pall of gloom over the school.  The moving pictures were forgotten; Amy Gregg’s part in the destruction of the West Dormitory ceased to be a topic of conversation.  Was Ruth Fielding going to be held in quarantine? grew to be a more momentous question than any other.

Ruth, however, was only absent from her accustomed haunts for two days.  The second day she remained to attend the patient because Amy begged so hard to have her stay.

In her weakness and pain the sullen, secretive girl had turned instinctively to the one person who had been uniformly gentle and kind to her throughout all her trouble.  Nothing that Amy had done or said, had turned Ruth from her; and the barriers of girl’s nature and of her evil passions were broken down.

It was not, perhaps, wholly Amy Gregg’s fault that her disposition was so warped.  She had received bad advice from some aunts, who had likewise set the child a bad example in their treatment of Mr. Gregg’s second wife, when he had brought her home to be a mother to Amy.

The poor child suffered so much from the effect of the poison ivy that the other girls, and not alone those of her own grade, “just had to be sorry for Amy,” as Mary Pease said.

“To think!” said that excitable young girl.  “She might even lose her eyesight if she’s not careful.  My! it must be dreadful to get poisoned with that nasty ivy.  I’ll be afraid to go into the woods the whole summer.”

Of course, it took time for these sentiments to circulate through the school, and for a better feeling for Amy Gregg to come to the surface; but the poor girl was laid up for two weeks in Mrs. Sadoc Smith’s best bedroom, and a fortnight is a long time in a girls’ boarding school.  At least, it sometimes seems so to the pupils.