“Sam! Sam!” remonstrated Bess.
“It’s a fact, Miss Bessie,” said Bert. “She’s too old and cross for anything! Just think, she’s going to keep Phil after school and whip him!”
“Yes,” put in Ted, “and it isn’t fair.”
“Phil!” said Bess incredulously. “You don’t mean that Phil Cameron has to be whipped in school! What has he done?”
“He hasn’t,” said Rob. “I don’t think he did it at all, only she doesn’t know who did, and so she is going to whip Phil.”
“Jiminy!” said Ted, rolling off the steps to the ground, in his excitement. “I’d like to go for her! It’s a burning shame to whip Phil. There isn’t a better lad in all the school, and she likes him herself, when she isn’t mad.”
From these remarks, however emphatic and lucid they might seem to the boys who were in the secret, Bess had gathered but the one fact, that Phil was in disgrace at school and was to be whipped. To her mind, corporal punishment in schools was degrading and brutalizing, and the idea of its being employed on a refined, gentle boy, like Phil, shocked her and
