The Madcap of the School

Raymonde Armitage has just turned fifteen and serves, more or less willingly, as the scapegoat of her school. The girls arrive for the summer term at new quarters: Marlowe Grange, a rambling moated Tudor house with a bell-tower, dark attics and a secret passage somewhere in its history. Raymonde and six friends form the Mystic Seven, a society that chalks a seven-rayed star on the desk of any girl it means to take down a peg. The term then runs as a string of escapades rather than one plot: a midnight scare, hide-and-seek in the roof spaces, a week picking strawberries at a land camp, canteen shifts, a river trip that strands them. Published in 1917, it also brings the home front indoors, ending with a fund for blinded soldiers gone missing and Raymonde accused of the theft.