“Rules!  Against a girl’s future!  Dear God!  Rules of a school-board!  Sam!  Won’t you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?”

Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, “Well, I’ll do what I can, but I’ll have to wait till the board meets.”

And “I’ll do what I can,” together with the secret admission “Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is,” was all Carol could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the school-board.

Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring to herself when he observed, “There’s too much license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death—­or anyway, bein’ fired.”  The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her mind.

She was at the hotel before eight next morning.  Fern longed to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky.  Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the school-board would be just.  She was less sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, “She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent!  Hee, hee, hee!” Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, “That’s what I’ve said all along.  I don’t want to roast anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?”

“When will they have me on the scaffold?” Carol speculated.

Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home.  Carol hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding.  Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, “What do you folks think about this Mullins woman?  I’m not strait-laced, but I tell you we got to have decent women in our schools.  D’ you know what I heard?  They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before Cy did!  Some tank, that wren!  Ha, ha, ha!”

“Rats, I don’t believe it,” Kennicott muttered.

He got Carol away before she was able to speak.

She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the town.  Kennicott had nothing for her but “Oh, course, ev’body likes a juicy story, but they don’t intend to be mean.”

She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the school-board were superior men.

It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met at ten in the morning and voted to “accept Miss Fern Mullins’s resignation.”  Sam Clark telephoned the news to her.  “We’re not making any charges.  We’re just letting her resign.  Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we’ve accepted it?  Glad I could get the board to put it that way.  It’s thanks to you.”