“Misses Dale and Travers, late for supper,” said the sharp voice of Miss Olaine. “Your excuses, please?”

This was the chums’ welcome as they entered the big entrance hall of Glenwood School after dark.

“Oh, Miss Olaine! the train was late, and we stopped on the way to——”

“That will do, Miss Travers,” said the teacher. “Other girls who came on that train were here ten minutes ago.”

“But they ran their legs off,” sniffed Tavia, when the teacher broke in with:

“And you took your time, of course, Octavia. Ten lines extra—Latin—Tuesday morning. I will point out which lines Monday. That is all.”

Tavia flared up and was evidently about to make the matter worse. But Dorothy pinched her, and pinched hard.

“You remember what we agreed coming over124 from the train,” she warned. “Swallow it like a man!”

“Oh—oh!” gasped Tavia. “She does make me so mad, Doro.”

“You wouldn’t have got the condition if you had kept still. That tongue of yours, Tavia, is like what Mrs. Hogan accused Celia of having: It’s hung in the middle and wags at both ends.”

“Well! it’s not fair!” grumbled her school chum.

“Of course not; but we agreed, fair or not, to bear with Miss Olaine—and to urge the other girls to bear with her. When she sits and wrings her hands and bites her lips so, we know what she is thinking of; don’t we?”

“Oh, yes!” admitted Tavia, with a shudder. “I know she is to be pitied. But it is dreadful hard to be picked upon the way she picks upon me——”

“Now, you know that’s nonsense,” replied Dorothy, sensibly. “If you would not answer back and give her an excuse for punishing you, you’d not be in trouble. She gave me no condition.”

“Oh, that’s your luck, that’s all,” sighed Tavia.

“You know that’s not so,” replied Dorothy, mildly. “Do be careful, Tavia. And let us tell the other girls and get them to try to be kind to Miss Olaine. I am very sorry for her.”

“Well—I s’pose—of course I am, too!” exclaimed125 the really warm-hearted Tavia. “But she does get my ‘mad up’ so easy!”

“You get mad without much provocation, it seems to me. Now, after church service to-morrow, let’s get the girls all in our room—our crowd, I mean—and tell them about the Rector Street School fire.”

“All right. The poor thing——”

“Miss Olaine?”

“Of course,” said Tavia. “The poor thing must be always remembering about the little kiddies, and how she came near to forgetting them——”

“And if it hadn’t been for the man on the steel beam outside——”

“Of course, that was your Tom Moran,” said Tavia.

“Celia’s Tom Moran,” corrected Dorothy.

But, never mind the further discussion of the matter between the two friends. The following is what Dorothy had copied out of the file of the Courier, and she read it to the other girls the next day, as proposed:

    “The burning of that fire-trap, the Rector Street School, long since condemned by everybody but the Board of Education, could scarcely have been regrettable had it not been for the several terrifying incidents connected with it. Some of the126 hairbreadth escapes were related in yesterday’s Courier; but the details of that incident which was most perilous—the salvation of the seven little girls and the teacher left to perish on the upper floor of the schoolhouse—were not known when we went to press last evening.

    “Although our fire department boys did their duty at every point, the spectacular rescue of these seven children and the teacher was accomplished by men at work upon the steel structure of the new Adrian Building, which was going up directly beside the burned schoolhouse.

    “At the height of the fire the teacher and her charges were discovered at the window of a small room on the top floor, by a workman on a steel girder that was being raised by the steam winch to its place in the structure. The girder was twenty feet long and the man—by the name of Moran—was riding the beam when the fire broke out.

    “He called to some helpers, and signalled the engineer below how he wished the girder handled. With a cable they swung the end of the heavy piece of steel so that its end rested on the sill of the window of the room where the teacher and her charges were trapped. The other end of the girder rested in the framework of the new building.

    “Then the teacher, Rebecca Olaine, of 127 Morrell Street, this city, opened the lower sash and got out on the broad window sill. She was able to127 lift and pass to Moran each of the children, and he ran back along the narrow bridge and handed them to other men waiting beyond.

    “Miss Olaine seemed to lose her strength when the last child was saved, and she could not walk the girder with the workman’s help. Fire had burst ............