That evening at the dinner table Gyp, very obviously, made a secret sign to Jerry. She brought one hand, with a little downward, spiral movement, to rest upon the other hand, the first two fingers of each interlocked.

"Oh! Oh! That's a secret sign you made," cried Tibby.

"Well, maybe it is," answered Gyp, putting her spoon in her soup with assumed indifference.

"Some silly girls' society, I'll bet," put in Graham with a tormenting grin.

Gyp had passed beyond the age when Graham's teasing could disturb her.

She smiled to show how little she minded his words.

"You'll know, my dear brother, _sometime_, whether we're silly or not,"

she answered with beautiful dignity. "_We're_ not a society that's organized just for _fun_!" Which was, of course, a slap at the Sphinxes.

Isobel roused suddenly to an active interest in the discussion.

"You're just copy-cats," she declared, with a withering scorn that brought Graham to Gyp's defence.

No wonder Jerry never found a moment in the Westley home dull!

"_You_ needn't think," he shot across the table at Isobel, "that 'cause you have waves in your hair you're the whole ocean!"

"Funny little boy," Isobel retorted, trying hard to hold back her anger.

"Mother, I should think you'd make Graham stop using his horrid slang!"

"That's not slang--that's _idiotmatic_ English," added Graham, smiling mischievously at his mother. He chuckled. "You should have heard Don Blacke in geom. class to-day. He got up and said: 'Two triangles are equal if two sides and the included angle of one are equal _respectfully_ to two sides,' and when we all laughed he got sore as a cat!"

CHAPTER X

THE DEBATE

"Gyp--_what_ do you think has happened?" Jerry frantically clutched Gyp's arm as they met outside of the study-room door. Jerry did not wait for Gyp to "think." "My name's been drawn for the debate--this Friday night! Miss Gray just told me. I'm taking Susan Martin's place."

"What _fun_----"

Jerry had wanted sympathy. "Not fun at all! I am scared to death."

A bell rang and Gyp scampered off to her classroom, leaving Jerry to go to her desk, sit down and contemplate with a heavy heart the task that lay before her. She had never so much as spoken a "piece" in her life; since coming to Highacres she had listened, with fascination, to the weekly discussion of current topics, envying the ease with which the boys and girls of the room contributed to it. She had wondered whether she could ever grow so accustomed to large groups of people as to be able to talk before them. Now Miss Gray, waving in her face the little pink slip that had done all the damage, was driving her to the test.

However, there had been a great deal in Jerry's simple childhood, spent on the trails of Kettle Mountain, that had given to her an indomitable courage for any challenge. Real fear--that horrible funk that turns the staunchest heart cowardly, Jerry had never known--what she had sometimes called fear had been only the little heartquake of expectation.

Once, when she was twelve years old, she had ventured to climb Rocky Point, alone, in search of the first arbutus of the year. Spring had come to the lower slopes of the mountain but its soft hand was just breaking the upper crusts of ice and snow. As she climbed up the trail a deep rumble warned her that a snowslide was approaching. She had only the briefest moment to decide what to do--if she retraced her steps she must surely be overtaken! Near her was a tall crag of rock that jutted out from the wooded slope of the trail; on this she might be safe. With desperate haste she climbed it and, as she clung to its rough surface, tons of ice and snow thundered past her, shaking her stronghold, uprooting the smaller trees, piling in fantastic shapes against the sturdier. As Jerry watched it had been fascination, not terror, that had caught the breath in her throat; she had not recognized the threat of Death; she had glimpsed only the picture of her beloved Kettle angrily shaking old Winter from his mighty shoulders.

So, as Jerry sat there in the study-room, her frowning eyes focussed on a spot straight ahead of her, her spirit slowly rose to meet the challenge of the debate. These others had all had to live through their "first," ease had come to them only with practice, she reminded herself.

It was pleasantly exciting, too, to be surrounded, after school, by a group of interested schoolmates, each with a suggestion.

"Just keep your hands tight behind your back," offered one.

"I 'most choked to death in one debate," recalled Peggy Lee, laughing.

"I had a cough-drop in my mouth to make my voice smooth and when it came my turn I was so scared I couldn't swallow it and there I had to talk with that thing in my cheek, and every minute or two it'd get out and 'most strangle me! Oh, it was dreadful. I don't believe that story about Demosthenes and the pebble."

"I'd get some famous orator's speeches and practice 'em. It makes what you say sound grand!"

"Don't _look_ at anybody--just keep your eyes way up," declared Pat Everett, whose experience went no farther than reciting four French verses before a room full of fond parents, at Miss Prindle's boarding-school.

All of this advice Jerry took solemnly to heart. Gyp volunteered to help her. Gyp was far more concerned that she should practice the arts of oratory than that she should build up convincing arguments for her side of the question. From the Westley library Gyp dug out a volume of "Famous Speeches by Famous Men." Curled in the deep rocker in Jerry's room she searched its pages.

"Listen, Jerry--isn't this grand? 'Let us pause, friends, let us feel the fluttering of the heart that preceded the battle, let us hear the order to advance, let us behold the wild charge, the glistening bayonets, the rushing horses, the blinding----'"

"But, Gyp, that's nothing about the Philippine Islands!"

"Of course not--at least all that about the horses and the bayonets--but you could say, 'Let us pause----' and wave your hand--like this! Here, he's used it again," her finger traced another line, "it sounds splendid; so--so sort of--calm."

Jerry pounced upon anything that might sound "calm." So, after she had compiled arguments that must convince her listeners that the Philippine Islands should be given their independence, she tried them out behind carefully-closed doors, with Gyp as a stern and relentless critic.

"Wave your hand _out_ when you say: 'Let us pause and consider----' Oh, that's splendid! Try it again Jerry--slower. You're going to be _great_!" Gyp's loyal enthusiasm strengthened Jerry's confidence.

There was for her, too, an added inspiration in the fact that Uncle Johnny was to be one of the judges. She wanted to do her "very best" for him. As the school weeks had flown by, each full of joys that Jerry could realize more than any of the other girls and boys, her gratitude toward John Westley had grown to such proportions that she ached for some splendid opportunity to serve him. She had told Gyp, one day, that she wished she might save his life in some way (preferably, of course, with the sacrifice of her own), but as Uncle Johnny seemed extraordinarily careful in front of automobiles and street cars, as the Westley home was too fireproof to admit of any great fire and there could not be, in November, any likelihood of a flood, poor Jerry pined vainly for her great opportunity. Once, when she had tried to tell Uncle Johnny, shyly, something of how she felt, he had drawn her affectionately to him.

"Jerry-girl, you're doing enough right here for my girls to pay me back for anything I have done." Which Jerry could not understand at all. She could not know that only the evening before Mrs. Westley had told Uncle Johnny how Gyp and Tibby had both moved their desks into Jerry's room, and had added:

"Gyp and Tibby never quarrel since Jerry came. She has a way of smoothing everything over--it's her sunniness, I think. Gyp is less hasty and headstrong and Tibby isn't the cry-baby she was."

The day before the debate Isobel asked Jerry to show her the arguments she had prepared.

"Perhaps I can add some notes that will help you," she explained condescendingly.

Poor Jerry went into a flutter of joy over Isobel's apparent interest.

She ran to her room and took from her desk the sheets of paper upon which were neatly written each step of her argument. She hoped Isobel would think them good.

"May I look over them in school?" Isobel asked as she took them.

Jerry would have consented to anything! All through that day her heart warmed at the thought of Isobel's friendliness. Like a small cloud across the happiness of her life at the Westleys had been the consciousness that Isobel disliked her; Gyp was her shadow, Tibby her adoring slave, between her and Graham was the knowledge that they two shared Pepper's loyalty, Mrs. Westley gave her exactly the same mothering she gave her own girls, but Isobel, through all the weeks, had maintained a covert indifference and coldness that hurt more than sharp words. Now--Jerry told herself--Isobel must like her a little bit!

Jerry discovered, when Friday night came, that the Lincoln debates were popular events in the school life. Every girl and boy of Lincoln attended; on the platform the faculty made an imposing background for the three judges. Six empty chairs were placed, three on each side, for the debaters who were to come up upon the stage at the finish of the violin solo that opened the program.

In the back of the room Cora Stanton, a Senior, stood with Jerry and the boy who made up the affirmative side of the debate. Cora was prettily dressed in blue taffeta, with a yellow rose carelessly fastened in her belt. Her hair had been crimped and Jerry caught a whiff of perfume.

Then she glimpsed a trim little foot thrust out the better to show a patent leather pump and a blue silk stocking. For the first time since she had come to Highacres, Jerry grew conscious of her own appearance.

Over her, in a hot wave of mortification, swept the realization of what a ridiculous figure she would present, walking up before everybody in her brown poplin that she knew now was different from any other dress she had seen at school. And Jerry could not get that shiny pump out of her mind! Her own feet, in their sturdy black, square-toed shoes, commenced to assume such elephantine proportions that, when the signal came for the debaters to go forward, she could scarcely drag them along!

How much more weighty could her arguments be if she only had on a pretty dress--like Cora Stanton's; if she could only sit there in her chair smiling--like Cora Stanton--down at the girls she knew instead of crossing and uncrossing her dreadful feet!

After an interval that seemed endless to Jerry, Cora Stanton rose and made a graceful little bow, first to the judges, then to the audience.

The speakers had agreed among themselves how much ground in the argument each should cover; Cora Stanton was to outline the conditions in the Philippine Islands before the United States had taken them over, Jerry was to show what the United States had done and how qualified the Islands were, now, to govern themselves, and Stephen Curtiss was to conclude the argument for the affirmative by proving that, in order to maintain a safe balance of power among the eastern nations of the world it was necessary that the Philippine Islands should be self-governing.