Swing, Swing Together Read Free Page B

principal’s sleep, any more than you have, miss. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to say to the lady. After all, I don’t even know your name.”
    â€œThank you.”
    They walked the next two hundred yards in silence. Then she put her hand lightly on his sleeve.
    â€œIt’s Harriet Shaw.”

CHAPTER
    5
    Penny-farthing shocker—Before the Plum—Something rather horrid
    â€œH ARRIET ! H ERE comes your policeman, riding up the drive on his bicycle.”
    â€œLet me see!” cried Jane, at the landing window before Molly had completed her announcement. “My word, Harriet, he is a cut above the average. Look at the way he rides—that straight back, like a Prussian. Is it really your policeman? What a perfectly ravishing moustache! Why do you suppose he’s here?”
    If Harriet had known the answer to that, she would not have turned so pale. Two days after the episode in the river she had begun to hope that she might have got away with it. The Plum had not said a word, nor even looked more disagreeable than usual, although the rest of the College had been buzzing with the story, amended slightly under the influence of good taste and girls’ adventure stories. There was not one inmate of Elfrida who had not pictured herself plucked from the roaring weir by Harriet’s policeman, wrapped in his enormous cape, carried to safety and dosed with a strong-tasting restorative from a hip flask.
    And now her rescuer, who had given his word not to speak to Miss Plummer about what had happened, was riding up to the front door as coolly as the cat’s-meat boy.
    â€œHe is the same one, isn’t he?” demanded Jane, pink with excitement.
    Harriet admitted that he was.
    â€œMarvellous! Why don’t you lean out and wave to him?”
    â€œLet’s not forget who we are,” cautioned Molly. “Besides, it might cause an accident, surprising a bicyclist like that. You’re too impulsive, Jane. I don’t suppose his visit has anything to do with Harriet. The gardener must have been intemperate again in Henley last night.”
    Jane pointed dramatically along the drive. “And do you suppose that this is the gardener being driven home in a growler?”
    Their faces pressed to the window and watched a four-wheeled cab follow the wide curve of the drive and stop below them, almost out of view. Its connection with the policeman was made clear at once. Two bowler hats emerged and approached the helmet, all that was visible from this angle of the hero of Hurley Weir. Words were exchanged, impossible to hear, but suggestive of a prior arrangement. Fully a minute passed before the doorbell rang.
    â€œI believe he is going to tell Miss Plummer everything,” said Harriet, sounding disturbingly like a clairvoyant. “Those men know all about it and they have come to make sure nothing is left out.”
    â€œHarriet, what an appalling thought!”
    Jane had lost her colour completely. “He doesn’t know about us—Molly and me—does he? You didn’t tell him there were three of us in the river?”
    â€œI told him I was bathing alone.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t say anything to the Plum yourself, would you?”
    Her fellow-conspirators waited, fingering their necks, for their reprieve.
    â€œNo.”
    There followed one of the more uncomfortable intervals in Harriet’s life. Sensing her ordeal, the others talked of other things, as wardresses do in the condemned cell, but each time a door opened anywhere in the house the conversation faltered.
    Crocker, the Plum’s personal maid, delivered the summons after forty minutes. “Begging your pardon, miss, the Principal wishes you to come to her study immediately.”
    Sympathy mingled with awe surrounded Harriet as she stepped downstairs. At the Plum’s door she drew a deep breath, thought of all the Tudors and Stuarts who had faced the headsman with dignity,