TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER I—INTRODUCES THE ANTAGONISTS.

CHAPTER II—THE NEW PUPIL.

CHAPTER III—POOR JOSEPHINE.

CHAPTER IV—“TOPSY” AND THE JUNIOR GOVERNESS.

CHAPTER V—HER CHIEF ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

CHAPTER VI—THE “QUIET CORNER.”

CHAPTER VII—THAT SLUG AGAIN!

CHAPTER VIII—STUPID, OR NOT STUPID?

CHAPTER IX—TWO WAYS OP PUTTING IT.

CHAPTER X—THERE ARE CATS, AND CATS.

CHAPTER XI—“PLEASE GIVE ME A REWARD.”

CHAPTER XII—A MOONLIGHT EXCURSION.

CHAPTER XIII—AN HOUR IN JOSEPHINE’S STUDY.

CHAPTER XIV—HAPPY LEARNING AND A DANGEROUS SWING.

CHAPTER XV—HELEN’S EXEBCISE-BOOK.

CHAPTER XVI—BREAKING THE RULES.

CHAPTER XVII—A DOLL FOR LITTLE ROSA, AND A GOOD TEA.

CHAPTER XVIII—THE PRINCIPAL’S PERPLEXITIES.

CHAPTER XIX—JOSEPHINE HOLDS THE SCALES.

CHAPTER XX—MISS ROWS CHOOSES A CONFIDANTE.

CHAPTER XXL—HER LITTLE BROTHER.

CHAPTER XXII—FREE TRADE IN SWEETMEATS.

CHAPTER XXIII—WAR AND PEACE.

CHAPTER XXIV—ONLY IN TIME TO BE TOO LATE.

CHAPTER XXV—A SURPRISE.

CHAPTER XXVI—JOSEPHINE’S TALE.

CHAPTER XXVII—SHE DOES GET IN!

CHAPTER XXVIII—MADEMOISELLE BEINGS HOT COFFEE.

CHAPTER XXIX—WAKING THOUGHTS.

CHAPTER XXX—A NEW KIND OF JUMP, AND NO BREAD AND BUTTER.

CHAPTER XXXI—“WISE AS SERPENTS, HARMLESS AS DOVES.”

CHAPTER XXXII—A CHANGE FOR MISS ROWE.

CHAPTER XXXIII—“FOR THE SAKE OF ROSIE.”

CHAPTER XXXIV—A MEDAL AFTER ALL, AND SOMETHING MORE.

LIST of ILLUSTRATIONS

- “Don’t be frightened for me. I always sit on the backs of chairs.”

- “One slight mistake,” said the old Professor.

- A clashing of the tree branches told her.

- Helen made a necklace of her two arms round her companion’s neck.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCES THE ANTAGONISTS.

It was towards the end of the Christmas holidays, and the Principal of Crofton House sat in her own private study, bending thoughtfully over two letters which had just arrived.

One of the letters was the recommendation of an English governess, whose age appeared from that letter to be the only thing against her. She was barely twenty-one, but she had great abilities’ highly developed, was skilful in teaching, a strict disciplinarian, and grave in her ways.

“And we must hope,” murmured the Principal, as she decided to engage her, “that tact will make amends for youth, and self-control temper inexperienced strictness.”

Unfortunately this hope proved vain.

“Guard yourself Oh! my daughter, guard that temper of yours. In’ trying to conquer others strive to conquer yourself,” murmured a mother lovingly, as she anxiously bid her daughter good-bye.

And, in reply to the earnest admonition, the new English governess for Crofton House gave her widowed mother a cold kiss, and with a cool “I daresay I shall do my duty,” she too said good-bye, and set out for her new post.

The mother turned back into her home, praying, with hot tears, that it would please God to soften her child’s stubborn heart, and to guide her into the paths of peace.

The other letter which on that winter’s morning had called an extra shade of thoughtfulness into the Principal’s pleasant, truthful-looking face was from the parents of an only child and proposed new pupiL

In writing of her the mother said: “Our Helen has been brought up so differently from most girls, that I fear she may appear to you in some respects almost eccentric. And I cannot deny that we have very greatly indulged her. She has been the queen in her own home, and is very high-spirited. But she is singularly generous-hearted and frank, and easily led by kindness. She is also the sunshine of her home, and I do think that even the well-known pleasant atmosphere of Crofton House would gain in brightness by her joyous merriment”

Crofton House was so noted for its high moral tone, for its girls’ bright faces, brave bearing, and well-developed minds, that its gifted and highly esteemed Principal had never any trouble to fill vacancies, as Mrs. Edison well knew when she absolutely pleaded for her child’s admission; and, even as it was, Miss Crofton hesitated some time before she answered the letter.

But she had seen and liked the parents; she had seen the bright, handsome girl herself; and the end of the matter was that she engaged the strict disciplinarian, and she accepted the high-spirited pupil.

The combination proved rather troublesome.

CHAPTER II.

THE NEW PUPIL.

“Clara Boswell, Sybil Pinckney, and all of you, I bring you another companion,” said Miss Crofton, one rainy Wednesday afternoon at the beginning of February, as she threw open the door of the largest class-room and ushered in a tall slim girl of about fourteen.

The two eldest girls, who had been thus addressed by name, came forward, and with a few more words of mutual pleasant introduction, and with a nod and smile of encouragement to old pupils and new to make friends with each other, the Principal left the room, and for a few moments she seemed to have taken the general power of speech with her.

Thirty pairs of eyes looked at the stranger, and the stranger’s one pair looked back at them with glances that greatly puzzled her new companions. None of them could decide whether those glances were merry or grave. At last Miss Pinckney said in soft, half-shy tones—

“Will you tell us your name, please? Miss Crofton forgot to do so.”

The stranger’s lips parted with a smile, and the expression of the bright, dark eyes was unmistakable now, as she came a step or two farther into the room, and answered with a quickness which startled her hearers, and at the same time banished their timidity:—

“I was just wondering who would speak first. My name is Helen Edison, otherwise called Topsy, in polite allusion to my head. I tried yesterday the effect of a whole pot of warranted prize-medal best bear’s grease on it, but you see it hasn’t made very much difference unfortunately; and mamma scouted my proposal to buy a smooth flaxen wig to make my first appearance in.”

“Did you really want to wear a wig? ” asked a fair, golden-haired child, looking up with big wondering eyes at the olive, oval face before her. She added gravely, “I think your great heap of little black curls must be much prettier than a wig would be. Don’t you? ”

“No, indeed. I’d rather have the lankiest of long lank carrots. I tried the effect of some thin slices of real carrots one day in a charade, and found the transformation in my appearance quite wonderful.”

“I should think so,” said roundabout, rosy-? cheeked Milly Wilmot, with a laugh, in which most of the others joined.

“What a queer girl you must be! ”

“Oh! very queer,” was the calm, grave answer. “You’ll soon see how queer when you’ve asked the regulation string of questions.”

“The what! ” exclaimed a chorus of voices. “Why, the regulation string of questions, to be sure. I know exactly what they are. I’ve read about them ever so often. I’m a new girl, and you are all old girls, and so of course you begin by .asking me,‘ Is your father a chimney-sweep or-’? ”

“Oh! how can you! ” in chorus from most of the wide-eyed listeners, while Clara Boswell looked indignant, and two or three exclaimed, laughing, “Oh I don’t stop. Do go on. What do we ask next? ”

“Well, let me think. Ah! to be sure. Next you ask me if I am older than I look, or if I look older than I am; and I answer,‘ That depends upon individual opinion.’ Then you naturally want to know whether my woollyish black hair proves me a Hottentot or a Zulu; and whether my father keeps a carriage; and if my mother has a lady’s-maid; and if the doctor has ordered that I am to have extras for breakfast; and whether I shall have a hamper once a month. There! I can’t remember anything more; but I know there are lots of other things you want to know. Do ask me some of them, please. I am in one of my polite moods to-day; to-morrow I may be quite different, and not at all nice to questioners; so do please ask me what you like now.”

“Well, in the first place,” exclaimed Milly Wilmot, “do pray tell us where in the world you come from—from Robinson Crusoe’s island, or where? For you are quite different from the rest of us, I’m sure.”

“Am I really? Mamma said she was afraid I should be. Gut all the same, I had no such fortune as Crusoe,” was the regretful answer; “although I might have been‘ Leila on the Island ’ over again; for there was a great storm at sea seven years ago when we all came over from India.”

“Oh dear, how funny!” murmured that golden-haired little Rosa Bell. “Then your father was an Indian, I suppose? ”

“A what! ” cried the new pupil, her cheeks flushing hotly for a moment. The next instant common sense returned to her, and her face cleared as suddenly as it had clouded. Throwing her arms about the child, she danced with her round the room to the accompaniment of her own rippling peals of laughter.

“But what is the matter? What have I said? ” asked Rosie. “You did say your father was an Indian, or a’ Zulu, didn’t you? ”

“Not exactly, you very small finisher. My father was a commissioner, if you know what that means; something rather high up, with a lot of hard work and looking after other people to do, and a great deal of anxiety; and now he is done with India for good and all, and he’s a great .deal older than mamma, and a good deal older than I am, and—but wait a minute. What capital balancing chairs you have here! I do like chairs that won’t topple over the instant you try to sit on their backs. Now this,” suiting her actions to her words, “is quite deliciously safe and comfortable.”

Whether Miss Helen Edison looked really safe, and comfortable was a matter, as she would herself have said, that depended upon individual opinion, but she certainly looked very contented as she sat perched on the top back-rail of one of the heavy, old-fashioned chairs, with her feet patting up and down on the seat, and converting her throne into a see-saw. Once the chair tipped back over-far, and Rosa Bell caught at it hastily with her hands with a little cry of fear.

“Thanks,” said the new pupil, calmly; “but pray don’t be frightened for me. I always sit on the backs of chairs, and there’s no fear for my neck, for I wear very stiff collars on purpose to guard it. But, while I think of it,” turning to the others, “how comes this little mite of a long-curled thing amongst all us finishers? ”

Rose answered for herself quickly.

“Because my papa and mamma are in India too. And Miss Crofton let me come here with my sister, so that I should not have to be somewhere all alone.”

“Oh! I see. My sister and the world, and the rest all desert island. Where is this wonderful sister who is the only person who prevents your being all alone? ”

“She is in the study learning her lessons. She’s always learning lessons,” with a little sigh; and Rose went off to join her, as the new pupil remarked—

“Dear me! What a pleasing contrast she and I will make. When mamma introduced me to Miss Crofton just now, she said gently, “My Helen has good abilities, but a slight want of application! And you can’t think how wonderfully true those last words were, at least about lessons. But I’ve tremendous application about some things.”

“About learning how to sit on the backs of chairs, you mean, for instance? ” asked Milly Wilmot.

“Just so. You see- my father always wished I’d been a boy, so as I am fonder of him than of all the rest of the world put together, excepting mamma, I have done my best to please him in my manners and customs.”

“And of course he has been pleased at having a sort of tomboy daughter? ”

“Well—no—I can’t say he has, unfortunately. But, then, as King Lear’s daughters say, * How hard it is to have a thankless pa!”

“Fancy quoting Shakespeare!” exclaimed Milly. “I’ve never read a line of him.”

“Fancy misquoting Shakespeare!” said a classical-faced companion, looking up from a volume of Tennyson’s out of which she was learning the “May Queen ” for her elocution lesson. Shaking her shapely little head at the irreverence, she once more bent it over the poem, while the misquoter continued—

“But then, thinking of application, there is another thing. Did you ever, any of you, try how difficult it is to make yourself look absolutely stupid? It took me a whole week’s tremendously hard practice before I could do it. But I have succeeded at last. Application met with its full reward. Just see if you don’t think so? ”

The new pupil had scarcely asked her question when there was a general start and exclamation. The transformation in the brilliant young face, a minute ago sparkling with intelligence, was marvellous.

The expression now was one of weak, pitiful helplessness; the lustre of life seemed to have faded away beyond recall, and the look in the eyes was strained and dreary as she turned them slowly from one to another, and muttered, “I don’t think the masters and governesses will expect very good lessons from me, will they? ”

As she spoke, Clara Boswell, Sybil Pinckney, and two or three others turned and walked away. The rest greeted her questions with a suppressed titter, which continued and increased as the stranger, still maintaining her most dismal aspect, began to imitate the repetition of a lesson in a mumbling, uncertain tone.

“Augustus and Elizabeth were both great men—I mean, Augustus was a man, and—the population in the time of Elizabeth was Augustus —at least-”

And then, with an instantaneous change to an expression of most grave and sober sense, the incoherent repetition gave way to the following entreaty, uttered in a tone of quiet, pathetic reproach—

“Girls, girls, don’t giggle! It is so unladylike. Whatever else you do, let me implore you not to giggle.”

For some seconds the giggling was worse than before, as the young Mentor shook her grave, curly head with an air of pitying sadness for her companions’ levity. But, piercing through the sounds of merriment, at length a hard, dry cough was heard approaching the room, and Clara Boswell flew back to the group gathered about the chair throne, exclaiming in a voice choked with strong emotion—

“Surely you are going to leave off this cruel nonsense now, and don’t mean to wound poor Josephine for the sake of a stranger we know nothing about?”

“If I am the stranger you mean,” remarked Miss Helen Edison calmly, “I think you are most unfair after all I have given you in the way of personal information; and as for poor Josephine, whoever she may be, if her sense of the proprieties is so strong as to be wounded by hearing us laugh and seeing me sitting on the back of a chair, the sooner it is wounded the better, I decide.”

“No, no, it’s not that, though; it’s not that. Clara is right, you will see. We ought not to have laughed,” said Milly Wilmot quickly, in contrite tones and with flushed cheeks.

The new pupil looked round her, and saw that most of her companions’, faces began to give more or less evidence of penitence or shame.

The next moment the door opened, and little blooming Rosa Bell reappeared hand in hand with a very tall, thin, almost white-haired girl of about seventeen. The pale careworn face and stooping shoulders gave the impression of a poor, half-starved seamstress just emerging from her dose ill-lighted garret to carry home the needlework by which she earned her miserable food and shelter. The lustreless look which Helen Edison had conjured up for a few minutes’ fun was an abiding reality on the face of Rosa’s sister.

Instinctively the air of merry defiance dropped away from the new pupil, and she slipped quickly and quietly down from her perch as the golden-haired child came forward with her companion.

CHAPTER III.

POOR JOSEPHINE.

“Miss Eddy-began Rosa, and stopped.

“I forget what you said your name was? ”

“Helen Edison.”

“Oh yes. Then please, Miss Edison, this is Josephine; and she is the only one,” added the child, with a tone of affectionate pride, “who is allowed to sit in the study alone when she likes to work. She is the oldest of us all here.”

“Pray don’t remember that,” said the elder sister quickly, and for the first time raising her sorrowful-looking eyes. “Try to think that I am the youngest here, younger even than Rosie, and you won’t despise me so much. Rose says you are very clever, she expects, and I am stupid —so stupid.”

“Are you? Then I expect I shall find I like stupid people,” was the instant answer. “You look very kind. If I crack my head or cut my fingers off, I’d rather come to you than to any one else here, I believe, to get mended.”

An eager, startled look of wonder appeared suddenly in the school-girl’s sad eyes, such a look as not even her companions of two or three years’ standing had ever seen before. It seemed as though light had suddenly been shown to her where all had hitherto been dark. And it was even so. Pity she was accustomed to. Forbearance had been her portion from others ever since she came to school This was the first time that any one had even hinted at the possibility of turning to her, under any circumstances whatever, for help or comfort. A new sun had suddenly flashed its light into her life. She might be of use instead of useless. Books were not the only path, after all, to esteem.

The new pupil’s first half-hour at school had not been lost.

Ten minutes later Milly Wilmot drew her away with her to the farther end of the room, and whispered, “It was very kind of you to say that to poor Josephine about going to her if you hurt yourself, and you really must be clever to have thought of it. But, of course, you did not mean it?”

“It would not have been very kind of me to say it if I didn’t,” retorted Helen Edison indignantly. “And I don’t know what school-girls may do, as I have never been one before, but girls at home are taught not to tell stories.”

“And so are girls at school,” said Milly, in her turn half indignant, but she was of too light and careless a nature to take such a reproof much to heart, and, whatever faults she might have, she had at any rate the virtue of good temper, and very soon added—

“But you must confess that I had some reason for thinking you were not in earnest, when you said you would get Josephine Bell to do anything for you. You must be able to see with half an eye, even though you are a new girl, that she is quite right, poor thing, in saying she is awfully stupid. Indeed, stupid is hardly the word for it.”

“No. Fear would be a much better one,” was the quiet answer.

Milly Wilmot turned and stared at her companion. “What do you mean? If you suppose that Miss Crofton herself frightens her, or lets any one else be cruel, you are very much mistaken. And you have seen already how all the elder girls look out for her and take care of her. There isn’t ODe of even the hardest of us that does not pity her tremendously for being so wretchedly stupid.”

“And between you, you have .made her wretchedly afraid of your pity, and afraid of having always to be pitied. And just because she cannot learn a lot of lessons so quickly as most people ! My father once said, when some friends were talking of people like that, that God had given a great many good gifts to men, and the least of them all, in his opinion, was the power to learn a great heap of lessons out of books.”

“And what did he think was the greatest of them?”

“The grandest of them all, he said, was the power to see the best qualities of others.”

There was a slight pause; and then, with a quick change of tone and expression, Miss Nellie gave her companion’s arm a little pinch, and muttered, “To save you trouble, I may as well tell you that my prime virtue is a singular skill in mischief; and as yours, I am sure, is a laudable love of fun, I hope we shall be good friends.”

Milly looked up with eager delight at the suggestion. As a rule, new girls had to wait to be chosen, but there was something about this new girl, her handsome face with its keen bright eyes, her daring, her merry impudence, and her dignified self-assertion, that made it appear quite fitting-that she should usurp the right of choice. Milly Wilmot felt that a distinction had been conferred upon her accordingly, and earnestly declared that, as far as she was concerned, she was sure they would henceforth be quite inseparable.

“We can walk together, you know, and learn together, and sit together,” exclaimed Milly, rapidly enumerating the privileges and pleasures, according to her ideas, of a real school friendship. “And we can talk together, and-”

“And eat together out of one plate, like two cats,” interrupted Helen Edison. “I hope I eat quickest. If I don’t, I’ll soon learn. I learn all those useful sorts of things very easily.”

CHAPTER IV.

“TOPSY” AND THE JUNIOR GOVERNESS.

A young lady, small and neat in appearance, of a paleness and gravity that made her look two or three years older than she was, and with a mass of brown hair arranged in the very tightest and smoothest of bands. Such was Miss Rowe outwardly, and her deliberate, even-toned voice was in exact correspondence to her appearance, as she stood before Helen Edison, and with a slight bow said formally—

“I have the pleasure of seeing our new pupil, I believe? I am sorry that I have forgotten your name.”

“And yet,” said Helen in her clear, ringing voice, and with its very calmest tones, that well matched her questioner’s,—“and yet the one I go by is such a very easy one to remember if you have ever read‘ Uncle Tom’s Cabin! ’ If you haven’t, I’ll-”

“Have not,” interrupted the governess quietly, and with raised eyebrows.

“Oh yes, thank you. Of course. Only that takes so long to say, doesn’t it? and I didn’t—I mean did not and does not—like to keep you waiting.”

There was a titter from the other end of the schoolroom, and a frown took the place of the flicker of a smile that for one instant had gleamed over Miss Rowe’s face at the peculiar effect produced by the new pupil’s self-corrections. She said more deliberately than before—

44 You are very considerate; but perhaps you will show more regard for my time if you answer my question at once, instead of entering upon other matters.”

Miss Edison’s lower jaw dropped slightly and her eyelids drooped. A general air of timid dejection came over her as she repeated with hesitation—“Question—your question t About 4 haven’t.’ was it? ”

Some of the listeners in the distance were suddenly seized with very bad colds, and the English governess looked quickly round, and then back at the young stranger, who was nervously plucking at her fine India-worked pocket-handkerchief, and looking the picture of half-idiotic misery.

Miss Rowe glared at her fiercely, and then mentally glared at herself for wasting fierceness upon such a worthless object. Her stock of respect and patience for clever girls was small enough; for stupid ones and ignorant ones she had an utter, overbearing contempt. Having anything to do with them wearied her unspeakably. She almost groaned as she said—“My question had nothing to do with’ your slipshod way of speaking. I asked you your name. I suppose you have not forgotten it? ”

“Oh no,” with an innocently infantile look of glee, “I have not forgotten that. It’s so nice and short. It’s Topsy.”

“It is what? ”

“Topsy.‘Specs I growed,’ in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ you know. Papa says it suits me nicely. He always calls me that.”

“Your father ought-” began Miss Rowe, and then she checked herself abruptly, and turned away from her new charge with a heavy heart and a frowning countenance. Fortunately the tea-bell rang, and Milly Wilmot flew back to her latest friend to show her the way to the dining-hall, and to murmur an astonished question as to how she dared act in such a manner towards Miss Rowe. Helen Edison threw her arms round her waist, and having held her back until pupils and governesses had all streamed off, she broke into a peal of silvery laughter, and whirled her companion round the room in a mad waltz.

“My dears, the tea is ready,” said a pleasant voice unexpectedly at the door, and in a tone of surprise. The dance came to an abrupt end, and, blushing deeply, Milly began—

“I beg your pardon, Miss Crofton, I-”

But the new pupil ran forward and broke in upon the apologies with a frank fearless—

“Oh, please, I hope you don’t mind. But I am so glad to find that I am almost sure I shall like being here, and I generally dance when I am happy.”

A gratified smile brightened the schoolmistress’s face, and the mild tone of rebuke was exchanged for a cheerful, “Then I hope, my dear, that I shall very often see you dancing. But run away to the dining-hall now, for if you have as healthy an appetite as you should have, you will not feel much inclined to dance when the tea is waiting.”

Milly Wilmot, at any rate, needed no second bidding, and with a sigh of relief she pulled her companion quickly with her out of the class-room and along the wide corridor. Halfway down it Helen made a resolute stop, and began to look about her.

“What is it now? Do come on!” remonstrated Milly. “We really are very late, and Miss Bowe would think nothing of giving the signal to rise from the table before we had eaten even our first slice, or of drawing such general attention to us that we could not eat in any comfort. And I am so hungry.”

“All right; so I am, too, so don’t be afraid. I’ve been a match for that bugbear of yours once to-day, and I daresay I shall manage the matter again. Where did that door in the archway that I stopped at lead to? ”

“Forbidden premises, I can tell you. It is the entrance to the governesses’ own private sitting-room. But-” as she opened the door of the dining-hall, and looked quickly at the long table occupying its centre—“I pity you,” in a whisper. “Miss Bowe has actually had the barbarity to keep you a place next her. It’s too bad for the first night.”

“Too bad! nonsense! ” was the low, laughing answer. “I feel truly grateful for the honour done me.”

“I only hope you may feel as grateful two minutes hence,” was the equally low reply, as Milly hastily passed to her own chair, and left the new pupil to make her way alone to the head of the table, to the only seat still remaining unoccupied.

The French and German governesses had their places at either side, but as the senior English governess, owing to illness, had not yet returned from her Christmas holiday, Miss Bowe was the presiding genius, and took good care to make her presence felt Milly Wilmot generally indulged in vigorous moanings over her own shortness, but on such occasions as the present she was far from envying Clara Boswell, poor Josephine, or the new pupil their height, and she slipped in between her two table companions with very unusual silence and want of commotion. Meantime Miss Nellie nodded a smiling return to Miss Rowe’s peremptory invitation to come up beside her, and as she sat down she asked brightly—

“Do you like dancing, Miss Rowe? I do. We have been having a little dance just now, Miss Wilmot and I; it was such fun.”

“Fun for which your companion will unfortunately have to pay a fine,” was the slow-spoken reply. “You escape because it is your first day here; but I have never before known a quite new pupil disobey the rules, or lead a companion into disgrace. You are a fresh and unpleasant experience for me, Miss Edison.”

A pair of shining brown eyes were turned up to Miss Rowe’s steel-grey ones with a wide-open, innocently surprised looking stare, and that specially clear, soft voice said with calm distinctness—

“I am very sorry, I am sure, ma’am. But what a funny school this must be. The very head of the school herself saw us dancing, and said she was quite pleased, and kept us to have a little talk, and now you tell us that we are to be fined for staying to listen to her Is that always the way things go here? ”

For a moment the junior English governess was nearly losing outward control, as well as inward command over her temper. She found those innocent-looking bright eyes and that musical voice most intensely exasperating, and she had to swallow down nearly a cupful of tea before she could steady her voice to say shortly—

“If Miss Crofton countenanced your want of punctuality, of course there is no more to be said. But even under such circumstances young ladies, who have been educated as such, would have offered some apology for being late.”

“Oh yes, of course. And so I meant to, really; only you see the thoughts of dancing put it out of my head for the minute. I do beg your pardon, but please may I have another piece of sugar in my tea? The doctor says that sugar is good for me.”

“Did the doctor also say that chattering was good for‘you? ” was the cold reply. But the new pupil was apparently not easily frozen. She greeted this question with a laughing—

“I don’t fancy the doctor has ever thought to give any opinion on the subject. Though papa often says that he is sure it’ comes as natural to me as to a magpie.”

“So I should think. But as we have not yet learned to be as fond of the sound of your voice as you seem to be yourself, you will oblige me by being silent for the next five minutes, and eating your bread-and-butter. I shall ring for leaving the table at the end of that time.”

To show that she intended to keep her word, Miss Rowe detached her watch from the chain, and laid it beside her on the table. Miss Edison munched away quietly at her bread-and-butter with the calmness of a young lady who has the whole evening before her for her meal. She finished her first piece of bread-and-butter just as the five minutes came to an end, and the governess laid her hand upon the top of the small table-bell standing amongst the tea things on the tray.

But there is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, and so there is sometimes a hindrance to the sounding of a bell, even though the hand be already on it. Before Miss Rowe could press down the brass knob she was startled into withdrawing her fingers by an eager, agitated exclamation—

“Please is the silence time up? May I speak now? ”

“Have you anything worth saying?” was the angry reply. “What is the matter? ” more anxiously, seeing the new pupil’s eyes fixed very intently upon herself. “Do you hear? what is the matter? Is there anything on me? ”

“Yes. I have been watching it crawling up, only you said I must not speak, so I could not tell you. The nasty thing is on your shoulder now—near your-”

Miss Rowes one known moral weakness was a loathing for creepy-crawlys of any and every description, and consequently the old pupils were no more surprised than was the astute young new one when the governess bounded up from her chair, almost shrieking—

“Near what? Where is it? What is it? Take it off, take it off! ”

Every one jumped up, every one gathered round.

“Oh, it’s a slug, it’s a slug!” screamed one girl after another.

“Ah—h—h! ” shrieked Miss Rowe, “then take it off, take it off, take it off!”

In her abject misery her voice for once descended from imperious command to entreaty. But the girls looked, and shivered, and gathered up their upper lips with sympathetic disgust and —did nothing. The new pupil calmly stretched forth her slender fingers at last.

“Stand still, please, a moment.”

The governess managed to command herself sufficiently to obey, and in an instant she was free from her unwelcome ornament, and the slimy little insect was between Helen Edison’s left thumb and finger.

“Thank you,” said Miss Rowe, striving to speak with some degree of graciousness to her deliverer, who stood demurely eyeing her captive, and busily thinking the while. She looked up quickly when she was thanked.

“Oh, it is nothing to me, thank you. I don’t mind them; but I should think that any of you who don’t like slugs had better go out into the garden and shake yourselves. Where one has come there are generally more.”

Tranquilly as that little piece of information was given, it was not so tranquilly received. There was a universal stampede, and in less than a quarter of a minute Miss Nellie, the slug, and —the bread-and-butter, were left alone. The slug was soon disposed of, and then the young lady seated herself comfortably, pocketed a good-sized piece of bread, took two slices of bread-and-butter on her plate, tilted back her chair, put her prettily-slippered little feet upon the ledge of another, and peacefully finished the meal that Miss Rowe had threatened to cut so short.

“Won’t you have a little more tea now to finish with? ” asked a timid voice. And, turning her head quickly round, Helen met the sad eyes of poor Josephine, and her own instantly softened.

“Have you been here all the time? ” she asked wonderingly.

“Oh no! I ran out with all the others. But I don’t think I am really afraid of things that cannot hurt, and I came back to ask you not to kill the poor little creature, or, if you thought you must, to do it as quickly as you could.”

“And were you satisfied with what I did? ” asked Nellie, with a keen glance at her companion. She was evidently, for some reason or other, greatly contented when Josephine answered that she had returned too late to see the fate of the insect.

“You were only in time, then, to see me enjoying myself,” said Nellie laughing; “and now that you have reminded me of it, I think that I really am thirsty enough to like a little more tea to finish up with.”

“May I pour it out for you? ”

“No, thank you. You might get scalded, or scolded, you know.”’

“But so may you, I am afraid, and I should like to spare you, if you will only let me.”

Nellie looked-at the wan, pale girl with a tender, beautiful light in the dark eyes that could be so brimful of mischief, and putting her arm round her as she stood beside her chair, she laid her head against her and said gratefully— “You may be quite certain that when I really want to be spared, or helped out of trouble, I will come to you. But just now I think I shall rather enjoy to see what a little scolding and bother will be like. You must know I have never yet had any in my life, and I am quite hoping for some here by way of fun,” said Helen, calmly, as she sweetened her tea very much indeed according to her own taste, drank it with much satisfaction, and then, before Josephine could stop her, gave four vigorous pressures to the bell, whose loud ting—ting—ting—ting seemed to ring out with something of defiance. At any rate Miss Rowe thought so, as the sounds met her ears even in the garden. She rushed in to discover what unauthorised fingers had had the audacity to touch that bell.

“The school shall be searched,” she exclaimed, “to discover who has been guilty of such impertinence.”

But no searching was required. Quietly seated in the dining-hall sat Miss Helen Edison, and when the breathless governess paused momentarily in the doorway, to master her wrath sufficiently to speak, Miss Nellie rose and came towards her with a sweet smile, saying meekly, as she slipped the piece of bread from her own pocket to Milly’s—

“I suppose I did right to ring the bell? You were about to ring it, I know, when I disturbed you about the slug, so I thought you might like me to attend to the matter, as it was forgotten through my fault.”

A sound very like a snort was the only answer vouchsafed to this gently-spoken little speech, and then Miss Rowe turned round abruptly and went off to her own room. She left all further supervision for that night to her colleagues and Miss Crofton. The new pupil and the slug combined had been too much for her. Quiet and a night’s rest were absolutely necessary to restore the young governess’s shaken self-control. Something else might have helped her more effectually, but of that she had, as yet, no practical understanding. Her mother prayed for her, but she did not pray for herself.

CHAPTER V.

HER CHIEF ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

“Your education appears to me to have been hitherto, most irregular, Miss Edison.”

“Most irregular,” assented Miss Edison, with a grave shake of her head. “Papa says it is only to be compared to a geological fault. Upheavals where you wouldn’t-”

“Wou-? ”

“Ah, of course, I had forgotten again, but I know what you are going to say. Would not look for them, and depressions where they ought not to be expected. Perhaps you won’t mind my just telling you that when papa says that he always says‘wouldn’t.’ I’ve noticed that particularly, whatever other changes he may make in the words.”

Miss Rowe looked sharply at the new pupil. Could she be daring to make fun of her? But no. That was impossible, and the young lady’s face bore the innocently grave expression of a child really wishing to give a curious piece of information.

“You are dreadfully stupid in some things,” said the governess shortly; while the pupil with an absent air tied two loose knots in her pocket-handkerchief comers, inserted her slender white forefinger and thumb in them, “parson and clerk ” fashion, and began solemnly bobbing them at each other, the more important thumb wagging its pointed turban in a most impressive and imperative manner at “poor me,” as Miss Helen murmuringly addressed her forefinger.

Helen Edison, the new pupil, was undergoing an examination by Miss Rowe as to her attainments, before having her place apportioned to her in the classes. In the ordinary course of events this examination would have been undertaken by the senior English governess, but, as has been already mentioned, that lady was absent through illness, and her energetic junior had to fulfil double duties, not only now but throughout nearly the whole of the term, with some help from the foreign governesses and the Principal herself.

It was so highly satisfactory to the young governess’s pride, and love of dominion, to be thus paramount in the schoolrooms that she cared very little for the extra work and responsibility thrown on her shoulders, and, to do her justice, it must be confessed that during the three weeks that passed between the commencement of the Easter term and the advent of Miss Edison, the Principal had been more than satisfied both with her teaching and discipline. The generally mild sway at Crofton House easily tempered any little extra sternness.

But Miss Nellie made her appearance on the scene, and, as the complaisant doctor said to the patient who dismally announced that he ate well, and slept well, and felt well, “Notts attorn changer tout cela.”

Even sensible, hopeful-tempered Miss Crofton herself had said to her sister-in-law the day before Helen Edison arrived, “Do you know I really feel almost frightened? Everything has been going on so smoothly.”

And young Mrs. Crofton laughed more merrily than she had done for a long time. But if she could have seen a few weeks into the future she might have looked grave enough. Even if she could have been a spectator of that examination of the new pupil by the thin-lipped governess, her merriment would have been checked.

Whilst we have been giving these few words of explanation Miss Rowe has been bending over a small manuscript book, containing some notes she had jotted down as a guide to her in the present task. How the pupil was employing herself you know. Miss Rowe having at length decided on what branch of learning she would next question the enigmatical girl before her, began with thoughtful deliberation to raise her head. But it went up with a jerk as her eyes fell upon Helen Edison’s knotted-up fingers, while at the same moment a sepulchral voice asked—

“Who married the king of the Cannibal Islands, and was she his first wife? ”

“Dunno,” was the squeaked out answer. “Then you’ll be swallowed,” was the reply. And accordingly, by the help of the other three fingers, it was swallowed, just as the spectator of the tragic end of this little play in one act recovered presence of mind and breath to remark, in a tone of cold, withering sarcasm—

“It is a pity, Miss Edison, that I did not know an hour ago that you took pleasure in those kind of amusements. We might both have been spared the trouble of this examination, for I should presume that a share of Rosa Bell’s lessons would best suit your tastes and intellect.”

“I am afraid not,” said Helen, hastily pulling the knots of her handkerchief off he» fingers, and putting the little mass of Indian cambric and embroidery into her pocket. “I don’t think I should like to share Rosie’s lessons, though they would be easy. I do so hate spelling and English grammar, you see.”

“I see nothing,” retorted Miss Rowe angrily, “but that you are very likely, I should say, to have to do very- many things you hate while you are here, if you do not take care what you are about. You inferred a few minutes since that, ignorant as you are of much that at your age you ought to know, there are some studies in which you consider yourself proficient. Pray what are they? ”

“Well, for one,” said Helen, slowly thinking over her attainments—“for one there is French reading, and then, I think, history, and—but, oh! ” with a sudden change to beaming animation, and speaking with a rapidity there was no checking, “Oh, you know all my cleverness in these is nothing, absolutely nothing, to my cleverness in whistling and playing cricket. Papa says no boy could be more perfect in the rules, and that I can hit a ball as well as Grace himself, barring his strength.”

“Doing what? ” exclaimed Miss Rowe, managing at length to make her voice heard above the torrent of eager words. And at that moment the door opened, and the Principal came in to learn how the examination was progressing. She walked up to her new pupil, and passed her hand caressingly over the boyish-looking, curly head.

“What are you looking so bright about, my dear? ” she asked kindly, but certainly with some surprise.

Miss Nellie’s face flushed a little. “I was just telling Miss Rowe that papa says, with plenty of practice, I might make as good a cricketer as Dr. Grace, bar strength, and— and—” with a tiny mischievous quiver of the crimson lips, “I don’t think she quite understands what‘bar strength’ means.”

Miss Crofton bit her own lips for a moment, and then broke into a laugh as she said, “No, missie, I don’t suppose she does. Miss Rowe has not the fancy that you have for boys’ pastimes, and she has been chiefly with girls all her life. But although she is not acquainted with boys’ expressions, she knows a very great deal more than I fear either she or I will ever be able to instil into this rough little head. I think I must take my turn now, at trying to find out whether there is anything at all in it already worth keeping there. If you please, Miss Rowe, will you kindly take the reading class in the garden room, and leave Miss Edison to me.”

“Gladly,” said the young governess, rising with a sigh of relief she did not care to stifle. She had not liked the new pupil when she first saw her yesterday, and she liked her still less now. There was, in fact, nothing in common between them but strong will, and a love of aggravating those with whom they were not friendly. And in the aggravation given she had certainly received the worst of it that morning.

Under the wise, gentle influence of Miss Grofton, Helen was like another girl. Instead of showing her poorest qualities, she began insensibly to display her best ones, and when Miss Crofton at length dismissed her they parted with mutual feelings of goodwill.

“She will be a very pleasant acquisition, I believe, my dear Miss Rowe; but she will require a little tact in dealing with her,” said Miss Crofton an hour later. And Miss Rowe drew back her head, and answered with a short laugh.

“I cannot say as to the tact, madam, but I should imagine she might try the far-famed patience of Job.”

And then with a bow she went off to get ready for the morning walk, and Miss Crofton returned to her study with once more rather an anxious look on her face. Meantime Helen Edison was giving a lesson, instead of learning one. When the Principal ended the examination she delivered her over to the German governess, with instructions to sit and listen while the class was held. In an interval between explaining exercises and hearing repetitious, Fraulein Houpeland asked the demure young damsel beside her—

“And has you, perhaps, learnt already some leetle ding this morning, since you are here?”

“Oh yes, Fraulein!” was the instant answer. “I have learnt a whole heap of things. One of them, the nicest, is that Miss Crofton is a brick, a regular brick.”

A good many eyes were raised rather suddenly from their books at this announcement, and Miss Wilmot whispered, “Oh, dear me, how dare you!” While Fraulein, opening her light-blue eyes to their roundest, exclaimed—

“Sbe is a breeg! What is den das? My English goes not so far.”

“What a pity! ” said Helen compassionately. “It is such a nice word, so expressive. Some people say‘cheese’ for the same thing, but I don’t like it myself. But all really fashionable gentlemen say one or the other, so which would you prefer me to help you to remember ? Shall it be cheese? I don’t like cheese, but if I did I expect I should call Miss Crofton a cheese, at-”

“Oh, you wouldn’t,” exclaimed Milly Wilmot. “At least, if you did, you would get banished to the attics, or, at any rate, sent to Coventry.” “And you would have to join me in that delectable region for talking of it,” retorted Helen, and then she added, “Never mind her, please, Fraulein; but next time you get the sweetest, crustiest bit of a beautiful new brick loaf just put heaps of fresh butter on it, and then, while you are eating it, only consider if you can think of any one you know in the world who is half as nice. I can’t, excepting papa and mamma, and now, perhaps, Miss Crofton.”

“And did you tell her to herself,” asked Fraulein, now beginning to smile, “that she is a crusty, buttered breeg? ”

“N—n—no, not buttered,” stammered Helen Edison, vainly struggling for composure; and then, as Milly Wilmot exclaimed—

“Nor‘ crusty,’ I hope,” she broke into a peal of wonderful laughter, that brought the tears into the eyes of the sensitive German.

“Ah! It is just so,” she murmured, “that I have dreamt the fairies laugh as they dance in our German forests.”

When the class was ended Fraulein kissed her new pupil, and sealed the commencement of a faithful friendship with a gift of chocolate.

CHAPTER VI.

THE “QUIET CORNER.”

At Crofton House the hours of preparation for the next day’s classes were from five to six, and seven to eight, “and,” as Milly Wilmot informed her new friend more expressively than elegantly—

“Any other little scrimmagy bits of time you can catch at in between.”

A few minutes before five Miss Rowe came to Helen with three books in her hands, and seating herself she proceeded to point out the morrow’s lessons, adding—

“Although you have had nothing to do today but look about you, from the first thing to-morrow morning you will be expected to take your due part in the classes. And I advise you to choose out some quiet corner in which to prepare your tasks, for you seem to me more apt at learning to be unladylike than in acquiring useful information.”

“With that hard-spoken speech, which the Principal would certainly have pronounced wanting both in tact and Job’s patience, the English governess rose, without waiting for a reply, and left the pupil to her meditations.

They were not amiable.

Six hours ago Miss Crofton had told her new pupil that she half imagined she had suddenly got a rough-headed, mischievous laddie introduced into her quiet flock. But she had said so with such a tone and manner, above all, with such a feeling, that the rough-headed, mischievous maiden had laid her soft young cheek down on the schoolmistress’s hand with an air of most sweet womanliness.

Now, an accusation was brought against the new pupil of being apt to be unladylike, and the tone and manner, above all, the feeling with which the accusation was uttered, were such that the girl, who prided herself on her boyish accomplishments, felt insulted, and sat meditating vengeance. It must be confessed that there was something very unboylike, unfortunately only too womanlike, in the touch of spite that had entered into her schemes of revenge.

A quarter of an hour of the first preparation time had passed before Helen Edison stirred after Miss Rowe left her, or raised her flashing wrathful eyes. At length Milly Wilmot whispered to her with good-natured anxiety—

“You really had better begin to work. Even Miss Crofton gets angry if we don’t know our lessons, unless we are ill, or anything real of that sort comes in the way.”

“All right,” said Helen, raising her face then with a grim little smile on it. “I’ll know my lessons, never fear.”

And so saying she gathered the books in her arms and got up from the table.

“Where, are you going? ” asked Milly in a tone of disappointment.

“To find a quiet comer,” was the short answer, with the same uncanny smile.

And disregarding the beseeching looks that asked her to remain, she walked off to the other side of the room, and when Milly looked up again from her books, two minutes later, she had disappeared altogether.

“Did you tell your new friend that none of the girls of our class are allowed to work out of this study? ” murmured pretty Rose Trew.

“Of course I did,” answered Miss Milly rather snappishly. “You know I did. You heard me yourself, but you always do ask such stupid questions, Rose.”

“Well, you need not bite my head off, if I do,” said Rose tranquilly, “and I thought I might have misunderstood you as Miss Edison must have done, for I saw her leave the room with all her books in her hand just now.”

“Doesn’t follow that she misunderstood me,” muttered Miss Wilmot sagely, and then, with a glance at the clock, she dropped her face into her hands and resolutely set herself to master some of those dreadful German rules, chiefly consisting of exceptions.

For some while a profoundly diligent silence reigned in the room. It was broken at last abruptly.

“Miss Edison, where are you?” suddenly exclaimed Miss Rowe. “Where is Miss Edison, young ladies? can any of you tell me? ”

“She has left this study,” said Rose Trew.

“She went away some time ago.”

“And where has she gone? Do you know? ”

“To find a quiet comer, she said,” answered Milly quickly, without lifting her face, and Miss Rowe was too far off to hear the accompanying giggle-

“I think she has carried her books to her‘ room,” said little Rosie, who had just come in with her sister. “I met her in the south corridor before I went to Josephine.”

The governess started up with a half-uttered angry exclamation. But the outward signs of her wrath were stifled almost as soon as visible, and her voice was icily cool and calm when she said, moving towards the door the while—

“As I am thankful to say that none of you have your new companion’s weak-minded, lowbred liking for breaking rules, and proving yourselves unworthy of confidence, I trust that I may rely upon you to continue your studies in silence while I go in search of her.”

A number of heads, moved with more or less of elegance according to the character of their owners, responded to this speech in the affirmative, and Miss Rowe departed. The door had no sooner fairly closed behind her than Milly Wilmot shut up her book with a bang, put her two elbows on the table, and said, defiantly—

“How dare she talk such rubbish I Low-bred, indeed! Why, she’s the beauty of the school! She’d be glad enough if she was only half as pretty, I’ll be bound.”

“There were a good many‘ shes ’ in that elegant speech of yours, I reckon,” said Dorothy Jackson, flicking up her pen.

“I guess there may have been, Miss Yankee, and I calculate that you’ll have to pay a fine for that large black kiss in your exercise-book.” Dolly looked down, and a dismal “Oh me! ” followed her discovery of the great blot. The next five minutes were given up to the most delicate of painstaking efforts to remove all traces of it, for the devotion of any of her plentiful pocket-money to the payment of fines was Miss Dorothy Jackson’s abhorrence. But, having thus easily routed one opponent, Milly had many other attacks upon her speech to answer, or to try to crush. As a specimen of her latter method of argument may be mentioned her retort of “Handsome is that handsome does,” to Susan Wing’s remark, that—

“I am slightly puzzled to see what her beauty has to do with proving she is not ill-bred, Mill?” “Mill, but not Mill’s logic,” murmured an unfortunate companion, who was vainly trying to keep her thoughts on her tasks, and away from the conversation, and when Milly Wilmot exclaimed, triumphantly—

“Handsome is that handsome does,” it was all up with the would-be student. She rushed into the fray. With a laugh she exclaimed—

“Why, Mill, what are you thinking of to use that proverb now? Don’t you see that it tells most absolutely against you? Miss Rowe says that Miss Edison’s conduct is the very reverse of handsome, consequently, according to you, she is a-

“A fright,” said Dorothy Jackson sharply, still gazing at the doubtfully restored copy-book sheet.

“Just so, Dolly dear, especially as she has been the cause of your risking a fine,” assented Milly sarcastically. And then she added, with a little yawn, “But, oh dear! I’m a great deal too hungry to go on arguing. I do hope they will be punctual with tea; they were five minutes late yesterday. I wonder whether Miss Rowe has found Miss Edison, and what she is doing to her! ”

With that wonder she listlessly turned back to her lessons, to the great comfort of her logical companion; and we will satisfy our wonder by following the irritated governess to the south corridor, whither little Rosie’s information led her to wend her steps. She stood upon scant ceremony when she reached the room shared by Miss Edison with Clara Boswell and Milly Wilmot. Opening the door abruptly, she exclaimed—

“Miss Edison, I must desire that you return to the study ins-”

She stopped short in her command. While she had been speaking her eyes had made a rapid survey of the room, and had failed to discover any living audience but an impudent sparrow sitting on the window-sill, and uttering through the glass a shrill, “Keep, keep.”

It may have been a piece of vain advice to its own poor little self to keep warm, but Miss Rowe took it unconsciously as an impertinent recommendation to keep her temper, and hastily shut the door in the face of the counsellor, with not even the gift of a crumb as reward that bitter cold evening.

Poor little bird: Poor young self-sufficient governess! We might add—Poor headstrong Nellie Edison! But, after all, it would be rather hard upon her to give her either pity or blame for not having tried to cure a fault of which hitherto she has been hardly conscious. Her great love for her parents, and the great love lavished upon her by them, and by her devoted old nurse, have combined to make life flow too smoothly to bring out the dormant self-will and passionate temper. Maybe it is well for Nell that not too late she is to be roughly roused, that betimes she is to awake to a knowledge of herself, and to know the stumbling-blocks that lie in her path heavenwards.

CHAPTER VII.

THAT SLUG AGAIN!

Miss Rowe, having left her truant pupil’s bedroom, next sought her in the senior study, in the large class-room, the dining-hall, the music-room, the little study, the garden-room—that is to say, in every room on the ground floor, with the exception of the Principal’s private study, into which no one was allowed to intrude during that hour, which Miss Crofton devoted to answering her numerous letters.

With every room entered, to no purpose, Miss Rowe’s irritation increased. At last the thought came to her that, perhaps, the aggravating newcomer had been hiding under one of the beds when she looked into the room, and enjoying the sight of her annoyance. With this suspicion she remounted the stairs, and once more turned into the south corridor. As her eyes fell on the door of the governesses’ private sitting-room she gave a slight sigh of envy as she thought of her two companions, Mademoiselle l’Ermite and Fraulein Houpelande, sitting there enjoying a little leisurely interval of rest and tranquillity. When she passed she heard cheerful voices within, and it occurred to her that she might at least ask those favoured coadjutors to aid in the present search.

She turned back, and opened the door. Having made one step in she stood still, and put up her hand to her eyes for a moment, as though she imagined they had suddenly lost their power of correct sight. It may be confessed that she had some cause for her surprise.

There, before her, seated comfortably on the little sofa, side by side with the good-tempered little German governess, was the missing pupil, Miss Helen Edison. A small table, drawn up conveniently before them, was covered with the young lady’s open‘lesson-books. She looked up as the door opened, and, acknowledging Miss Rowe’s entrance with a smile, said, with calm cheerfulness—

“What a pleasant little room this is! I am so glad I thought of coming here. Kind Fraulein has helped me to understand and learn my lessons beautifully.”

Miss Rowe came a step farther into the room.

“lam simply astounded, Fraulein Houpelande, to find that you abet a pupil—a new pupil, but I already begin to fear a most wilful one—in breaking the Principal’s rules. I repeat, I am astounded! I ”

Poor Fraulein trembled visibly before her junior but very much more strong-minded fellow-teacher, as she answered, almost humbly—

“Ah! Miss Rowe, but truly, with your pardon, I think not Miss Crofton would be displeased that for this one time I have given a couple words of help to this poor child so fresh from home. And, moreover, she came pleading you had yourself told to her to find a quiet corner for her studies.”

Miss Rowe looked quickly at the pupil as these last words were uttered, and fancied she saw a smile flit over her face. The suspicion made her own accent still more biting as she replied—

“It is true I recommended her to move away from Miss Wilmot, as the temptation to keep up a chattering, tittering conversation with her appeared to be irresistible; but having also, not a minute before, told her that the next hour was to be devoted by her to learning lessons for to-morrow in the room she then occupied, I should have imagined that even her intellect, neglected as she has been-”

Helen started up, almost flinging the table over as she came from behind it, exclaiming— “I have not been neglected. You have no right to say that! If you are angry with me you Lave no right to ”

“My dear, my dear, what is the matter with you?” asked Miss Crofton in dismay, as she unexpectedly came into the room and saw Helen’s flaming cheeks and flashing eyes. She had feared that there might be some encounters between her two latest inmates, but she had certainly not looked for a desperate one thus early.

Miss Crofton had come up with a German letter she wished Fraulein to answer for her in time for the evening’s post, but she forgot all about post hours in the vexatious scene before her. She repeated her question—

“What is the matter with you, Miss Edison?” Helen’s chest heaved as she answered in a choked voice—

“I don’t mind what people say of me, but papa and mamma—they shall not-She says I have been neglected.”

“Why, my dear child,” said Miss Crofton, breaking into a smile, “I should never have guessed from your countenance that you were given to making mountains out of molehills. We won’t wait to ask just now who is spoken of in such an uncivil way as she; but whoever it may be has only quoted a sentence out of your own mamma’s letter to me, in saying that you have been very much neglected. Your mamma repeated that sentence again yesterday to Miss Rowe also, so you see we cannot help all being aware of the fact And now good-bye for the present I see you have been encroaching on poor Fraulein’s little spare time. She will be too good-natured ever to say you nay, missie, so I must trust the matter to your own generosity, and, unless you come to any great difficulties in your work, I am sure that you will try to remember it is my wish that you should never leave the study during preparation hours.”

“I wish I could always have all my orders from you,” answered Helen impulsively. “I will remember what you tell me.” And then, with a defiant glance at Miss Rowe, she ran out of the room before the Principal could decide what to say to the complimentary but rebellious speech.

After tea Mademoiselle l’Ermite was on duty during the second preparation hour, and it was Miss Rowe’s turn to indulge in a little rest and solitude, on which no one was at all wishful to intrude.

The work downstairs proceeded with the tranquillity usual to it before the yesterday’s advent of Miss Edison, until that young lady happened to have occasion to dive to the bottom of her pocket for a pencil As she did so some recollection seemed to dawn upon her, and, hastily pulling forth the pencil, she began to fumble for something else.

Helen Edison’s pocket was not at all what Miss Rowe would have called a young lady’s pocket. She had a boy’s habit of stuffing everything into it that would go in or that she wished to have “handy.” Sometimes the things she desired to have handy were rather peculiar. The article she was hunting for now would come under that term, and yet she held it in considerable esteem. On the table between herself and Milly she deposited two handkerchiefs, two or three bits of string, a bootlace, a piece of the chocolate Fraulein had given her in the morning, and which Milly instantly popped into her mouth, a necktie, and various other articles, amongst them a big brown four-bladed penknife. But whatever else there was, it was very evident that the special object she now-sought was absent. When the pocket was quite empty’ she looked up at Milly Wilmot with a comical expression of dismay and disappointment.

“Oh, dear! ” she sighed, “I am sorry. I have lost such a little treasure. I suppose I must have pulled it out of my pocket when we were out walking. I would much sooner have lost my pocket-handkerchief, or even this dear old knife.”

“What was it, then % your purse, or a locket, or what? ” asked Milly, with a mingling of sympathy and curiosity. “You might tell a body.” Her curiosity, if not her sympathy, was destined to be soon satisfied. Almost as she spoke she and all in the room were electrified by a piercing shriek overhead, accompauied by the sound of some small object thrown down. Whilst every one else started up with answering cries of terror and wonder, Helen Edison sprang to her feet with the delighted exclamation— “Oh, I shouldn’t be surprised if Miss Eowe has found my little treasure after all! ”

And in her unexplained joy she once more seized her schoolfellow round the waist, and in the very middle of the grave preparation hour whirled her up the room just as the door was flung open, and Miss Rowe rushed in, regardless of her usual cold dignity. Breathless, and trembling with excitement, she fell up against Helen before she saw her, and then with no wasted apologies she clasped her by the arm, and exclaimed—

“You wicked, spiteful girl! you did it on purpose! Go upstairs and And it at once, and bring it here that I may watch you, and see that you really do throw it away this time.”

“Throw what away, Miss Rowe?” asked Mademoiselle l’Ermite anxiously.

“The—the—ugh! ” ended Miss Rowe, by way of an answer, with a strong shudder. “Miss Edison knows, and she deserves to have to sleep on them. A-a-a-a-h!! I ”

“It would be a soft bed,” said that young lady calmly; “only I should pity the poor slugs.”

“Don’t be so — so — disgusting,” almost screamed Miss Rowe. “But go up to our room above, and hunt for it—the horrible thing—till you find it. It will be crawling away, and hiding somewhere, and I shall never feel at peace in the room.”

Helen smiled. “Poor little creature! Papa says he thinks them such wonderful things. And I assure you, though I don’t know much of natural history, I am positive they can’t bite.”

“You deserve to be bitten, you tiresome little mademoiselle, if you are in the habit of keeping such pets,” said Mademoiselle l’Ermite, with a smile, and coming forward in the iuterests of peace, while Milly whispered behind her schoolfellow, with sudden fearful eagerness—

“Was it loose in your pocket? ”

“Ah! By-the-bye, how did that piece of chocolate taste? ” was the laughing reply.

“Gar-r-r,” cried Milly, her upper lip shrinking into nothing, and she rushed out of the room.

Mademoiselle repeated aloud the question she had overheard, and shrugged her shoulders most expressively as she^demanded—

“But then—no—it cannot be that you had a—a—limace—ah! loose in your pocket! Say then?’’

“Oh no, mademoiselle. I guarded it most carefully in my little tortoise-shell bonbonidre.

It was quite comfortable, I as-’’

“You are a regular magpie,” exclaimed Miss Rowe, interrupting her angrily. “Twice I have desired you to go upstairs and find the creature to throw it away. Now, I give you the order a third time, and don’t let me have to speak again. Go at once.”

As she spoke she gave her pupil a little push towards the door, and Helen as quickly slipped aside, and moving away from the door altogether, ran across the room to the clock.

“I am very sorry,” she said, as she reached it, “but I find it will be more than half an hour yet before I can oblige you by hunting for that slug. I promised Miss Crofton that I would not again leave this room during preparation time, and when I make a promise I keep it.”

“Miss Crofton would absolve you from your promise under present circumstances,” said Miss Bowe, with angry anxiety.

“Perhaps.she would,” was the irritating answer. “But she is not in to ask, for I saw her pass the windows just before you came down.” And then Miss Nellie sat down and folded her arms, and it was evident that nothing but bodily force would make her move.

Josephine Bell’s weary eyes looked at her sorrowfully for a few moments, and then clasping her restless, nervous hands, the poor ignoramus rose and turned to the English governess—

“Would you please let me go to look for the slug for you? ”

CHAPTER VIII.

STUPID, OR NOT STUPID?

When Josephine had entreated to be allowed to search for that dreadful slug Miss Rowe contemptuously replied—

“You! Of what use would you be, except to knock the ink over, or throw a table down? Why, you could not find your own book yesterday when it was right before you on the shelf.”

, “That is true,” murmured Josephine humbly, and then a bell was rung, and one of the servants was sent up to look for that troublesome slug.

“And please do find me my dear little box, too,” added that irrepressible new pupil; “Miss Rowe has dropped it somewhere.”.

“And bring it to me when you find it,” commanded Miss Rowe magisterially.

“Thank you,” said Nellie contentedly, “I shall be so-much obliged to you if you will take care of it for me, for it is almost sure to get broken or lost in my possession, now that it is empty.”

To this speech Miss Rowe vouchsafed no notice whatever. She went off to watch the search, which, however, resulted in nothing but the finding of Helen’s box. Whatever became of the slug, it was never again seen by any of the inmates of Crofton House. For many days Miss Rowe would not enter that sitting-room, and for many weeks whenever she sat there she had an uneasy sensation that a slug was endowed with breath strong enough for her to be sensibly conscious of feeling it on her neck, preparatory to the advent there of the creature itself.

I fear that it need scarcely be said that Miss Edison was delighted at the non-discovery of the insect’s hiding-hole.

“If I felt any compunction before,” she said to Josephine, “at having kept the thing to tease her with, I felt none, I can tell you, when I heard the answer she gave to your kind offer to help her. How could you be so—so stupid? I beg your pardon. I don’t mean stupid in the way you call yourself so, but stupidly good to give her such a gentle reply? ”

A faint flush overspread Josephine’s pale face—

“Miss Rowe was quite right. I am dreadfully stupid at finding things. It was because she was so troubled I could not help wishing to help her. But it was foolish, I daresay, for me to offer. And if not,” she added, in a low, gentle tone, “if not, you know, we who love our Lord have to remember that when we are reviled we revile not again.”

Helen gazed at her companion for a few moments in silent amazement. Then she said shortly—

“Those are the sorts of things that-I shall never remember.”

CHAPTER IX.

TWO WAYS OP PUTTING IT.

Helen Edison had been a schoolgirl for two or three weeks, when one morning she and eleven of her companions were gathered together for their, history class in the book-room. Josephine Bell was one of the number of the class, and Miss Rowe was to hold it. Helen had one of her touch-me-not looks on her face, as Milly Wilmot used to call them, when even that laughing piece of merriment herself did not care to be too free with her clever companion.

“Look out for breezes,” muttered Milly to her next neighbour, as they sat awaiting the governess.

“I have just been thinking so,” whispered back Rose Trew, following her companion’s glance at Helen, who was sitting very erect, with folded arms, and the generally dancing eyes bent gravely on the carpet.

Helen Edison’s first unfriendly impressions with regard to the young teacher had developed into an intense dislike, which was fully reciprocated, and the last two or three days a new element of discord had risen up between them in the shape of poor Josephine.

Miss Rowe had received instructions, like every one else about the place, to be very gentle and forbearing towards that eldest but most ignorant pupil, and accordingly she refrained from reproofs or punishments for the invariably imperfect or half-done lessons. But the short laugh, or few cool stinging words, with which she vented her biting contempt, were much more cruel than any open reprimands could have been, and generous-hearted Helen Edison had begun to feel them as keenly as the unfortunate girl at whom they were directed. A few days since she had taken upon her to prevent the sneers, to some degree, by hastily giving answers to questions addressed to Josephine, and no amount of angry prohibitions or fines on the part of Miss Rowe, nor grateful but tearful entreaties from Josephine, had yet prevailed to check her. This was the state of affairs, unknown to Miss Crofton, that Wednesday morning when Helen Edison sat looking her haughtiest, and Miss Rowe entered the book-room and took her seat with her most resolute expression of countenance. No wonder that observant members of the class were able to prophesy that the following hour would not flow on altogether smoothly.

However, for some little time all went well. Josephine was, of course, at the bottom of the class, and when at length her turn came the question put to her happened to be one. that she could answer. Miss Rowe raised her hands with mock admiration.

“Girls, girls,” she exclaimed, “we must chalk it up! Miss Bell has actually given a correct reply, —an absolute fact, although almost past belief”

A little half-nervous laugh, from two or three pupils who stood greatly in awe of the stem, strict governess, greeted this speech, while a painful flush burnt in Josephine’s usually pale cheeks. Helen Edison flung up her head, and her crimson lips parted suddenly; but, ere she could find cutting words to match her feelings, she caught so imploring a gaze from the poor victim that she changed her purpose, and shut her mouth more quickly than she had opened it.

“If you have anything on your mind you wish to say, pray say it, Miss Edison,” said Miss Rowe sarcastically. “It is a pity, you know you said last week, to be too prudent.”

“I know it is a great pity to bother one’s head with too much learning,” answered Helen coolly; “and so, as we evidently shall not get through much above half our history lesson to-day before Professor Smith comes, I wish I hadn’t studied it.”

“If you would study your own language, and learn to speak it like a lady, it would be well,” retorted the governess angrily. “You will have the goodness to write out the word * hadn’t ’ a thousand times this afternoon. Perhaps that will satisfy your fondness for the compound. Miss Wilmot! Attention, if you please. If I see you guilty of the vulgarity of whispering again I shall turn you out of the class. Now, Miss Trew. Did the death of Julius Caesar prove the annihilation of the cause for which he died? ”

Pretty Rose Trew always looked her prettiest, her companions said, when she looked a little troubled or perplexed. If that were the case, she must certainly have looked her very best just at that very moment as she looked up, startled, on being addressed, and began, by way of answer—

“Oh yes, of course—any one-” And then she broke off suddenly, stammering and con* fused, and said humbly—” Oh, please, I beg your pardon; but would you please repeat your question? I am very sorry, I did not quite hear it.”

What she had heard was Milly Wilmot’s triumphant whisper, “I told you there’d be a fuss this morning,” and so Miss Bowe guessed; but, having inflicted two punishments already, she condescended to accept the apology, and repeat her question. Once more the lesson proceeded smoothly, and it really seemed as if the storm had blown over. Unhappily, in those days Emily Rowe’s unsubdued spirit rejoiced rather than otherwise in storms. “Blessed are the peacemakers ” were words without meaning to her. She would have complete supremacy or war; and as she questioned and taught the chapters of Roman History apportioned for the day’s lesson her mind was at least half occupied with angry thoughts of her fearless pupil, and half-unconscious resolves to make her suffer through Josephine if she could not make her suffer through herself.

Once more the end of the class was reached. Once more it came to Josephine’s turn to answer.

Or at any rate to be questioned, and not only keen-witted Helen, but even her dim-sighted protegée, read in the governess’s curling upper lip and slight smile a determination to gratify herself at the expense of the poor ignoramus.

Helen tried to smile encouragement to her companion, but her smile had so much of sternness in it as only to prove an additional cause of trouble, and the girl’s face paled visibly as Miss Rowe, after a few moments’ thoughtful pause, said briskly, with a slight laugh—

“Now, Miss Bell, rouse up all your energies. It is once more your turn to distinguish yourself. Will you tell me some of the causes, direct and indirect, that led to the transformation of the Roman Republic into an Empire? ”

Miss Rowe might as well have asked the girl to deliver a comprehensive lecture on botany, or the languages of the East, as she well knew; and nothing would have astounded her more than to find Josephine was capable of giving even the most shadowy outline of a correct answer. But nevertheless she fixed her eyes upon her with a calm, expectant gaze, beneath which poor half-taught Josephine shrank into dumb, stupid despair, and looked the semi-idiot the talented tormentor believed her.

The question asked admitted of no short, sharp, decisive response, such as Helen had lately flung forth for her schoolfellow’s deliverance from misery. Even the clever, quick pupil herself must pause and think before giving a sensible reply to such a query, and Miss Rowe took advantage of the expected pause.

“What, Miss Bell! ” she began in a bantering tone. “No answer at all? Dear me! this is sad, and when you began the lesson so brilliantly, too. But, do you know, I have just been thinking of something for your advantage, as the advertisements say. Are you attending to me?”

“Yes; oh yes,” murmured Josephine, with quivering lips, and trembling in anticipation of what was to come. She distrusted the young teacher’s tender mercies; so did her champion. But they were neither of them prepared for the fulness of the cruelly insulting blow which fell upon her.

“You are attending to me?” repeated Miss Rowe; “that is right. And I am glad to hear it, although you certainly look as if you were attending to nothing. But what I wish to say is that for the future you will oblige me, both for your own benefit and my comfort, by going over all the lessons you have to prepare with the help of your little sister Rose.”

She had scarcely uttered the last word when a gasping sob from Josephine for a moment drew all eyes towards her. But only for a moment; the next instant, amid a general murmur of, “Oh, how cruel!” before which even Miss Rowe half quailed, Helen Edison sprang forward, and with flashing eyes exclaimed at the top pitch of her ringing voice—

“You base, mean coward! My father would ask you if you are not afraid so meanly and despicably to stab one of your fellow-creatures. You coward! ”

“How dare you speak to me so? ” asked Miss Rowe, in a low voice of concentrated passion, also in her turn rising and springing forward.

“Dare! ” echoed Helen, in accents of the supremest scorn. And at that moment the door opened, and Miss Crofton stood gazing in speechless amazement, and with a face marked by deep displeasure, at the scene before her. Josephine Bell, white and trembling, uttering dry, gasping sobs; the whole class in confusion; and the English governess and the new pupil, looking like two wild cats, confronting each other.

“What has happened? What is the meaning of all this commotion? ”

“I must beg you, Miss Crofton, to permit me to be relieved of Miss Edison’s attendance at my classes,” began Miss Bowe, in a voice shaking with passion. “She has been most insufferably insulting.”

“Not so insulting,” retorted Helen fiercely, “as you have been to poor—to Miss Bell. Madam,” turning to Miss Crofton, who was always thus addressed by her pupils, “she has just-”

“My child! whom do you mean by she?” asked the Principal, in a grave, gentle tone, as she came forward and laid her hand on her excited pupil’s shoulder.

A change came in Helen’s expression at that tone and touch, and in a lowered voice she resumed—

“Miss Bowe has just given an order to Miss Bell to have her lessons taught her by little Bose. Is not-”

Miss Crofton started, and looked equally pained and shocked as she interrupted with the exclamation—

“Oh no; it is impossible. My dear Miss Bowe, you could not so have misconstrued my request to you to think of every means in your power to aid Miss Bell’s efforts at self-improvement? You could not have seriously given an order to an elder sister to put herself under the teaching of one so very many years younger than herself? ”

“No, Miss Crofton, you are right. I could not, and did not,” answered the young governess quietly.

And Milly Wilmot thought that she detected a triumphant gleam in the grey eyes from beneath the drooped lids. But Miss Rowe continued coolly—

“When I was a child my brother often got me to hear him repeat his Latin lessons, although I did not know a word of Latin; but I was quite able to tell him if he left out words or sentences. In like manner I believed that it might be a help to Miss Bell to have some one to repeat her lessons to, before bringing them into class. And,” with a crushing glance at Helen, “any one of common sense would have concluded that Miss Bell would prefer employing her sister for this purpose, whose great love of being with her would prevent the office being one of drudgery, to any one else on whom she would have less claim.”

Miss Eowe ceased, looked round, at all the faces before her, and quietly sat down conqueror. She had so stated her case that even Josephine ceased her sobs, with a feeling that in letting them have vent she had given a greater proof than ever of her dull stupidity, and although Helen was fully conscious that the affair was now represented in a favourable aspect not rightly belonging to it, she still saw that she would have to confess herself to have been over violent, and hasty in taking up the cudgels. She did not wait for orders, but raising one of her hands and laying it on that of Miss Crofton’s, still resting on her shoulder, as though to give herself strength for her task, she hastily but clearly apologized for the words she had used, then turned and pressed a swift kiss on the Principal’s hand, and ran out of the room.

“She is a strange child,” said the Principal thoughtfully, looking down absently at her hand,

“A very insolent and disagreeable one, I think,” said the English teacher. “The sooner her spirit is brought under the better.”

All the girls had gone off now to prepare for their next class, and the two ladies were alone. As the young imperious-tempered governess spoke a shade of anxiety and pity fell over Miss Crofton’s face, and she stepped up to her, and laid the hand which had rested on the pupil’s shoulder on the teacher’s. Miss Bowe moved under it rather impatiently, but the Principal kept it there, saying gently—

“Nay, my dear, you must not mind. Remember, I am old enough to be your mother, and—forgive me if, in all earnest friendship, I say that all of us need pray that our own spirits may be brought under the influence of God’s Holy Spirit of love and peaceableness. For us teachers it is of the deepest importance that we should remember this. Our Lord says to us, as He said to St. Peter, * If you love me, feed my lambs.’ Our work in the world is of the very noblest if it be performed in the right spirit— that is, the spirit of love.”

And then the earnest, true-hearted, Christian Principal of Crofton Hall withdrew her hand, and sought her own room to spend five minutes in prayer for all those committed to her charge, and for herself that she might have a right judgment in all things, and be guided to speak the word in season.

Miss Bowe took advantage of her departure to mutter to herself, with scornful indignation, “ The idea of preaching to me I ” and, thus scattering to the winds the good seed sought to be planted in her heart, she provided herself with a volume of Dante’s “Il Purgatorio,” and spent the next leisure hour in thorough enjoyment of the dreary pictures drawn by that masterly and sardonic hand. She also would have written an “Il Purgatorio” had she the genius, and would have delineated a good many people she knew in very unpleasant positions.

CHAPTER X.

THERE ARE CATS, AND CATS.

Helen embellished her exercise book with a drawing of a cat dragging itself stealthily along,‘ with its body close to the ground, towards a wounded dove, vainly trying to flutter upwards with a broken wing.

“One slight mistake in this sum, Miss Edison,” said the old Professor, with a smile bent on the book just handed up to him. “One slight mistake, but really I must forgive it on account of the very clever sketch below. May I ask if it is a copy? ”

“No, sir,” said Helen demurely; “it is only a memory of something I saw this morning.”

“Dear me! Then I hope you saved the dove? ”

“I think I startled the cat a little,” replied Helen, with a curious light in her eyes. “But I got rather a nasty scratch myself in doing it.”

“Dear me, dear me! did you really? ” said the Professor. “I hope, then, that you have had it seen to.”

“Oh! thank you, I haven’t troubled about it, sir; it’s all right again. And please,” she added hurriedly, as the door opened and the Principal entered, “please will you let me see now if I can discover my mistake in that sum! ”

She held out her hand eagerly, but the fussy little elderly gentleman was not to be so hushed up. He liked his clever, heedless, handsome young pupil, and instead of attending to her request he called out—

“If you please, Miss Crofton, I have just learnt that one of your young ladies has had a scratch this morning from a savage cat, and has neglected it. I assure you it should be attended to without delay. The scratch of a fierce cat is sometimes as poisonous as a mad dog’s bite.”

“Yes indeed, Professor, so I have heard,” replied the Principal in anxious tones, as she came quickly forward and made her way to the pupil indicated, who was looking unusually confused.

“Miss Edison, my dear, you should have told me of your hurt,” said Miss Crofton reproachfully. “You know, my dear, how strict my rule is that I should know of all such matters instantly, however trivial they may at first sight appear. Let me see your scratch now at once, please.”

“I can’t, madam,” said Helen, with flushed cheeks. “It’s—it’s—internal.”

“It is what? ” shouted the gentleman, startled out of his usual professorial dignity by the extraordinary information. “Good gracious! how can the cat’s scratch be internal? ”

Helen glanced up at him as he stood fluffing up his iron-grey hair, and gazing at her as if she were some newly-discovered fossil, and then she suddenly ducked her head down, and was seized with a violent fit of choking.

“Miss Edison!” said Miss Crofton sternly, and with a sudden expression of comprehension on her face. * “Compose yourself, Miss Edison; you are interrupting the class. You need not be alarmed for her, Professor; the scratch has not broken the skin.”

“Ah, I see!” said Professor Smith, relaxing into a smile. “In that case, if. she feels any hurt at all it is indeed internal. But our young lady was more frightened than harmed, I should say.”

“You are certainly right, Professor,” assented the Principal, as she moved away to her seat, and the lesson proceeded, while Milly Wilmot muttered in her friend’s ear—

“I guess it was your internal feelings that got the scratch, ma’am.”

“What a genius! ” muttered back Helen. “Are you not afraid to be so clever? They say geniuses are short-lived.”

Before Professor Smith’s class was over Miss Crofton was called away to little Rose, who had somehow managed to tumble down the stone steps into the garden, and had bruised her leg, hurt her arm, and got a terribly big bump on her forehead, rapidly turning to all the colours of the rainbow.

Neither Josephine nor any of her companions knew why the Principal had been summoned out of the room, and to one, at least, of the number it was a great relief.

The door had scarcely closed when Helen Edison raised her eyes from her book on geology, with which they were now occupied—

“If you please, sir, that creature was a two-legged cat.”

“What! what! what !” exclaimed Professor Smith, astounded, and pushing his spectacles above his bushy eyebrows. “Really, Miss Edison, you must pardon my saying that you are the most singular pupil it has ever been my lot to instruct. On what grounds, pray, do you found your belief that the ichthyosaurus‘was a two-legged cat? The most careful and profound research proves it to have been of the lizard tribe, and to have been possessed of the full compliment of six legs. It was utterly unlike a cat in every particular.”

“Then,” said Miss Helen reflectively, “it is equally certain that the long-named thing was also utterly unlike a good many human beings.”

“No doubt,” assented the Professor.

“But,” said Helen, “I don’t care to have you think that I was more frightened than hurt this morning, as you said half an hour ago, so I wish, please, just to tell you that the cat that scratched me was a human cat, and it scratched my pride and dignity badly, and they are both smarting still.”

“Internally! ah, to be sure, internally! ” exclaimed the old Professor, and he broke into a sudden burst of laughter, which greatly astonished most of his pupils. It appeared equally to astonish himself, and also to frighten him, for he checked his merriment as suddenly as he had given way to it, and with a hasty, almost humble, “I beg your pardon, young ladies,” hurriedly resumed his geological lecture with an air of even greater solemnity than that with which he usually honoured his lady pupils.

Miss Helen Edison had relieved her mind, and during the following quarter of an hour proved a most exemplary student.

CHAPTER XI.

“PLEASE GIVE ME A REWARD.”

It was a rule at Crofton House that the twenty minutes before the dinner hour should be relaxation time. The girls might spend that little space exactly as they pleased, even in doing absolutely nothing, if they so chose. But there was one privilege especially attached to those twenty minutes which had as much as anything to do with the happy atmosphere usually prevailing in the establishment.

From ten minutes past one until the half-hour the Principal was always quietly seated in her arm-chair in her own study—in the winter beside the fire, in the summer beside the window leading through the wide French glass doors into the garden. And thither any one of the inmates of her home was welcome to come, from the senior English governess, the next in authority to herself in the house, down to the shock-headed little lad who weeded the gravel-paths and cleaned the boots.

Any one who was in trouble, perplexity, difficulty, or even disgrace, might claim a hearing from the chief during those invaluable twenty minutes. If two happened to come together, it was established that the younger, and presumably the weaker, had first attention. But, as a rule, the wheels of the establishment ran so smoothly that very frequently for weeks together Miss Crofton would have her twenty minutes as a little quiet breathing interval for herself. The privilege had been made more use of since Miss Edison’s arrival than the schoolmistress ever remembered to have been the case during a similar period, since its first establishment the year after she set up her school.

To tell the truth, Miss Nellie very much enjoyed a quiet chat with Miss Crofton, for whom her liking was as great as her dislike for Miss Howe, and she seized every excuse to plead admission during the holiday minutes to the sanctum. Then Miss Rowe had several times claimed an audience to complain of her headstrong pupil, and once Milly Wilmot’s rosy, round face had made its appearance, all tear-stained and piteous, to beg off a punishment which she had incurred through following the mischievous Nellie’s leadership. Altogether the patient, hard-worked Principal had begun to resign herself to the expectation of daily visitors, and was accordingly the less disappointed when, soon after she had left little Rose quietly sleeping away some of the effects of her tumble, a tap came to the study door, and was followed by the appearance of Helen Edison’s curly dark head. The eyes beneath the curls were not quite so brave as usual in their glances, and the two little, slim, white hands hung down in front with a copy-book between them.

“Come in,” said the Principal. But her voice was very quiet, even stern, in its gravity. Miss Crofton was having a good deal of trouble with this wilful, indulged, only child, and the half-understood matter of the pretended scratch and interruption of one of the masters’ classes had much annoyed her. She was not disposed to meet her pupil’s interruption of her quietude with her usual genial greetings and friendly welcome. However, Helen did not expect smiles just then, so she was not disappointed. She obeyed the “Come in” meekly, and as the schoolmistress looked at the girl’s fine expressive earnest face she began to grant a pardon before it was asked.

“I am very sorry I vexed you, madam, by laughing in the class to-day,” began Helen demurely; “but—but—be did look so—funny.” And then that mischievous crimson mouth began to unbend and quiver into laughter again—that laughter which nearly every one found themselves so utterly unable to withstand.

Miss Crofton made a vigorous effort at self-control as she said—

“My dear child, you bad no right to excite Professor Smith into agitation. You had no right at all, as you well know, to allude to any matters whilst with him outside such as were connected with your studies. How you came to forget yourself so far I cannot understand.”

“It was owing to that,” replied Helen, opening the book she had brought with her at the cat and dove drawing. Like the Professor, Miss Crofton was for a few moments lost in admiration of the unsuspected genius displayed in the spirited little sketch, whose meaning she read too clearly to need explanation. At last Helen said quietly—

“I made the sketch in my book without thinking, and then I could not tear it out because of the sums, and when the Professor asked me about it I could not say,‘The cat is Miss Rowe,’ could I? I did tell him after you had gone out of the room that it was a two-legged cat I could not do more, I thought.”

“I should think not,” said Miss Crofton, with a half laugh, which she could not wholly stifle. “I should think not indeed, as regards saying for whom you meant the cat But, my dear child, do you not know that your sketch is a proof of a great want of charity? You make Miss Rowe’s life far harder for her than it need he. Teaching is very trying and wearying work under any circumstances. But- for Miss Rowe it is harder than it would be for many. She has a high, impatient temper, like yourself, which she needs to be perpetually curbing in dealing with even her most docile pupils, and this in itself is very tiring; but you expect her never to be irritable, never to be hasty, never to be severe, never to look for obedience from you unless she will spend time and care in almost suing for it. This is very unjust of you and discourteous. It is also much against your parents’ intention in placing you here. If your father were in this room at this moment he would tell you that one of the highest duties any one can learn is to learn to obey.”

“I do obey you,” said Helen, in a low tone.

“Yes,” said Miss Croffton gently, “that is. very true. But, my child, why do you obey me? Is it for the sake of obedience, or is it because I have been so happy as to win your love?”

“Because I love you,” was the instant answer; but the handsome young face looked thoughtful too, and hopefully yielding.

The schoolmistress drew her to her side as she continued kindly—’

“And for the future you will continue to obey me because you love me, and you will yield obedience where obedience is due to others for duty’s sake, even perhaps a little also to spare me the vexation of having to listen to complaints about you? I can even give you another reason, that I think will help to make your submission to Miss Rowe more easy.”

“What? ” eagerly. “That she will be going away soon? ”

“No, indeed,” answered the Principal, rather taken aback. “Certainly not, unless you worry her so that she is obliged to go. I was about to tell you that she has a widowed mother and young brother greatly dependent on her exertions, and you will be truly guilty of great cruelty if you so trouble her that she cannot remain here, or that I should find I cannot keep her. Do you understand? ”

“Ye—es,” said Miss Nellie slowly. Matters had taken a wholly unexpected attitude to her. After a silence of some minutes or more she said at length, but unconsciously with the air of a gracious little queen—“Yes, then. I will put up with her for the sake of the little brother, and to please you, as much a3 ever I can for the future. I will really; and to reward me for that beforehand you will please say yes to what I am going to ask you, won’t you? ”

For answer Miss Crofton gave free vent to her laughter this time, as she exclaimed—

“Well, truly, you are a little Miss Impudence to come asking rewards for doing, or rather, for the present only promising to do, what you deserve punishment for not doing I ”

Nevertheless, Helen Edison’s petition was granted, for it was a generous request to be allowed four times a week to give up her scanty leisure in order to help poor Josephine with her lessons.

CHAPTER XII.

A MOONLIGHT EXCURSION.

“Milly, tell me quick, how much do you weigh? ”

There was such eagerness and anxiety in Helen Edison’s tones as she asked the question that Milly Wilmot started up in her bed in affright, and exclaimed—

“Seven stone nine when I was weighed last holidays in the hay scales; but oh I what’s the matter? Am I too heavy? Is the floor giving?” “It’s not you that are too heavy, but I that am too light,” was the quick answer. “My body does not weigh enough for my spirits tonight. Do jump out of bed, please, and hold my feet down, for my spirits are getting lighter every moment, and I am quite dreading to feel my head bumping against the ceiling.”

Thus exhorted, Milly did spring out of bed and run to her friend with a face full of alarm, which was visible enough even in the moonlight. She had. heard of people being seized with fevers in which they talked strange nonsense, and she certainly thought that her favourite schoolfellow was seized with one of these fevers now. And the worst of it was that Clara Boswell, the sensible senior, was away on a two days’ visit to some relations just returned from a foreign residence.

With the exception of the inmates of that room, the whole of Crofton House was wrapped in silence .and slumber, for the hour was one o’clock a.m. The night was beautifully calm and bright, and, for March, very mild. Milly had been asleep for three hours when she was disturbed by the shaking of her bed to see her companion, wrapped in her crimson cashmere dressing-gown, standing in the middle of the moonlit floor, and giving little springs up and down, which set the whole room vibrating. Then came the startling question.

Milly was trembling as she took hold of her friend’s hands instead of her feet, and implored anxiously—

“Do stand still I do get into bed again! Then you know you can’t go up to the ceiling.”

“Unless T went up flat, pancake fashion, you know. No, I really can’t risk that, I might happen to knock my funny bone.”

And with that remark Miss Helen Edison freed her hands from her companion’s grasp, put them on to her shoulders, or rather, to be quite correct, clasped them both over one shoulder, and turned her into a sort of leaping-pole, flinging herself lightly backwards and forwards, while she hummed—“Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? ” to the end of that charming ditty.

“Sing too, Milly, do sing too,” she said encouragingly. “I’ll let you have my shoulder now, if you like.”

“I wi—wi—wish that you’d get into—bed,” jerked out Milly, shivering with fear and chilliness. “I can’t think what is the matter with you to-night.”

“Can’t you? ” laughed Helen, as she waltzed off to her schoolfellow’s bedside, caught up a blue flannel dressing-gown, and waltzed back again.

“Put that on,” she commanded, at the same time helping obedience to the command, and then adding—“Did you ever see a bottle of soda-water, and did you ever see it opened? ”

“Yes, often,” answered Milly, a little reassured as to her friend’s sanity by the fetching of the dressing-gown., “I’ve seen lots of bottles, and seen them opened too; but what has that to do with you? Have you had a bottle of soda-water to-night? ”

“Ugh! No, indeed, and don’t wish; it’s the horridest stuff I think I ever tasted. But what I want you to know is that I am the bottle of water-”

“Wh—what! ” shrieked Milly Wilmot, starting back, and instinctively seizing up the nearest chair, and holding it as a barrier between herself and the evidently very-much-up self-declared soda-water.

“Ah: that’s no good now,” said Miss Nellie, with a long ripple of low, silvery laughter. “I went off long ago. I’m the soda-water, Clara Boswell is the cork and the wire. They have taken her away, and I have come out—POP! ”

And with the “POP ” she bounded clear up on to the barrier chair, as Milly dropped it and tumbled backwards, put one foot swiftly and lightly on the top of the back, and, with a second bound, came neatly down into the middle of Milly’s bed.

“How nice! ” she ejaculated, with a contented sigh. “Your bed is springier than mine, Milly.

I wonder whether Miss Crofton would mind our changing. You see you are so much heavier than I am that I don’t suppose springiness is of much account to you. Besides, I’ve noticed that when you go to bed you generally like to lie still.’’

“I should have liked to lie still to-night,” groaned a doleful voice from the midst of a huddled-up mass of blue flannel on the floor. “If you are going to keep dancing on my bed may I have yours? ”

“Certainly, ma’am, with the greatest pleasure in life. But at the same time I may as well inform you that I am not going to dance indoors much longer, on your bed or elsewhere, for the present. I am going out for a walk, or rather for a climb, I have long wished for, and I am only getting up the circulation now. You may come too, if you like, only you see you are rather thick and heavy, and though the coping would he sure to hold, it is not too wide, and the branches might perhaps happen to break.”

“What do you mean? ” asked Milly, forgetting cold, fear, and sleepiness in an utter surprise as Helen once more sprang from the bed to the floor, whilst speaking, and ran across to one of the windows, of which for the first time Milly noticed that the blind had been drawn up, giving to view the. silver-moon touched beech-tree, whose leafless branches reached within three feet of the glass.

For answer to her schoolfellow’s astonished query Helen Edison repeated laconically—“I’m going for a climb.” Then she sprang up on to the broad window-sill, softly undid the bolt, and still more softly raised the sash.

“Good-bye, my dear,” she said, with a mischievous little breath of a laugh. “I’ll be back soon; don’t go to sleep.”

So saying she swayed her arms backwards and forwards once or twice, put her foot over the sill, and Was about to bound outwards when her companion, now thoroughly aroused by the rush of fresh cold air and amazement at her friend’s audacity, made a plunge at her, caught her from behind, and. held her in a tight clasp, exclaiming loudly—

“0 Helen, Helen! you shan’t go, you shan’t! You’ll be killed! ”

She had barely time to utter her protest before Helen had twisted herself free, jumped back to the floor, and clapped her hand over the noisy mouth.

“Milly! Hush, then, hush,” she said rather sharply, and in her most resolute manner. Then she pulled her forward towards the window, and pointing out said—“Look down there, Milly; although it’s grass below, it would be a good way to fall, wouldn’t it? ”

“Why of course it would—a horrible way; that’s the very thing,” said Milly Wilmot, facing round with surprise. “Of course it would be a good way to fall—at least a bad way—that’s why I wouldn’t let you go. And you were actually going to risk it, though you have thought about it I How could you? ”

“Don’t say how‘ could ’ you. Say how * can’ you, if you like, for I mean to go, although you have put off my charming journey for a few minutes. But going as I mean to go I don’t consider any risk; going as I will go if you rouse up any one to stop me won’t be a risk either, for it will be a certainty, for I will just take the jump straight off down to the ground there, and if it should kill me my death will lie at your door.”

“Oh, how can you say so? ” said Milly indignantly, who, logical or illogical, could at any rate see the unreasonableness of this statement.

But Helen was in no mood for argument. “Well, I don’t care a bit, my dear, whether you agree with me or not. I only know that I intend to make a certain journey through the air, during the next fifteen minutes, that I have long looked forward to, and that to prevent your trying to stop me I threaten to jump down there, and you know well I will keep the threat unless you promise to be quiet until I get back.”

Milly looked at the brilliant, resolute young face before her, and she did know well that the perilous threat would be carried out if she gave cause for it. “But you will be killed!” she urged in despair.

“I won’t be killed,” answered Helen confidently. “Mamma says I have been in the constant habit of putting my life in jeopardy ever since I could crawl. I was only three years old when I managed on board a ship to get ever so far up a sailors’ rope-ladder. When I got tired of climbing I just dropped my feet, clung with my hands, and set up a squeal. You may imagine what mamma felt when she saw where I was. But I was got down all right.”

“Almost a pity you were! ” pouted anxious Milly, “if you are to spend your days in keeping other folks in a perpetual state of worry about you.”

“Poor, dear old Milly,” murmured Nellie, with another,soft little laugh. “She shan’t be in a perpetual state of worry about me, she shan’t, only now and then; and some day she shall go home with me and see my dear, dear mother, and that will make amends for everything.”

So saying, with a parting kiss she once more sprang up on to the window-sill. Milly involuntarily covered her eyes with her hand, and did not open them again until a clashing of the tree branches told her that at any rate her schoolfellow had accomplished the first step in her proposed journey—a journey about which she had several times speculated during the past few weeks, but as Milly had hitherto supposed, merely as a matter for the exercise of imagination.

Crofton House was a beautifully irregular mass of building of mingled dark-red brick and granite. There were turns, and twists, and angles everywhere, inside and out. Broad window-sills, corridors, dim corners, and archways within; and little balconies, copings, ivy, non-understandable projections, and queer-headed waterspouts without. The place had been built by a gentleman according to his own fancy, and when he died its great size in proportion to the

ground belonging to it made it so unmarketable that Miss Crofton found her little fortune sufficient to cover the purchase money. Having thus invested her all in the building, she soon succeeded in winning through it good interest for her money, and its eccentricities had never before excited any of her numerous pupils to perilous adventures. Fortunately for the peace of mind of schoolmistresses, there are not many Helen Edisons in the world.

The room occupied by Helen and her two schoolfellows was in one of the most deep-set of all the angles, and it had two great windows and a little one. One of the great windows had a clear look out over the garden and fields beyond, but for the beech-tree into which Helen jumped. The long, narrow middle window had a quite unimpeded dear look out, and was furnished with a minute balcony, about capable of holding one good-sized flower-pot. The second large window was the original cause -of Helen’s daring enterprise. She called it a spiteful window, for its outlook was close on to a bit of sharp projecting wall, which had been added to the house with somewhat peculiar effect at the last hour, when it was found that otherwise this room and the bay-windowed room next but one to it would inconveniently clearly and closely overlook each other.

Helen called the window spiteful, but her abuse was really intended for the wall. She would have had the greatest satisfaction in helping to pull it down. “And then,” as she said to little Rose, who, with her sister, occupied the small bay-windowed room, “you and I would have such fun. We could throw things across to each other, and talk to each other, and I could act all sorts of things at this window for your, benefit.”

Rosie, too, sighed over that interfering late-built bit of wall, but she never dreamt, like her schoolfellow, of revenging herself by creeping round it.

Having successfully made her leap into the beech-tree Helen’s next proceeding was to descend to the ground, run a couple of yards and climb into a second far smaller tree, which helped her up to a wall coping some way below the spiteful window. To step on to this coping and make her footing sure from the swaying tree was a work of care even for her slight, agile figure, and with the help of clinging to an outstretched gargoyle. Milly put her hand over her own mouth to keep herself from shrieking as she watched her friend pull herself up from this precarious platform, to another narrow ledge three feet, higher up, by aid of another gargoyle.

When Helen had reached this point she paused for a few moments and turned her face, with a smiling nod, to Milly. It was the last she would be able to see of her until her return, for die was now at the edge of the projecting wall. The next moment she caught with her disengaged right hand at some sprays of ivy, threw her right foot round the. corner, and was gone. From that point the journey was not so difficult. The ivy helped her to pull herself up another two feet to a broad brick ledge, passing immediately beneath the windows of the small intermediate room, of Josephine Bell’s room, and of that adjoining, where the two English governesses slept. After that it gave way to another form of ornament utterly useless for climbing purposes.

At each of the three rooms the young midnight traveller made a pause. At the Bells’ window she was so Btartled that she almost fell backwards. She suddenly found herself within a few inches of Josephine herself. But for the glass she must have been discovered now, even by her breathing.

The wan, sad schoolgirl was standing with her back to the window, her lint-white hair pressed against the glass, through which tho moonlight streamed upon the open pages of a book, held up to catch as much light as possible! Even thus she was trying to master her tasks for that hard young English governess, who could look to her own comforts, but had not yet learned to look to the comforts of others.

“Poor Josephine!” murmured Helen, with bright tears glittering in her eyes. She was doubly glad now that a few days before she had gained the Principal’s leave to give help to her companion, although as yet sympathetic diffidence had held her back from offering that help.

“I won’t put it off any longer,” she murmured, and the tears fell, and lay shining on the window sill until the wind came by and carried them upwards. Helen crept along her strange footway to the next window. She could not see in through that The blind was down and the curtains drawn, and Miss Rowe was fast asleep. Could Helen Edison have seen her at that moment she would have been as startled as she was at finding herself so close to Josephine BelL

Miss Rowe was smiling in her sleep, with as loving a look upon her face as Miss Crofton could have worn. She was dreaming, of her young brother, and of the happy holidays she would make for him when he came home from school at midsummer, if he brought home a good report; and if not—well, for her little brother Miss Rowe was very tender-hearted.

Helen got back safely to her anxious friend, although the return journey was a matter of more difficulty than the outward one, and the last step bid fair to defeat even Helen. It was all well enough to jump from a firm ledge on to-a tree; but to attempt jumping from a tree on to the ledge was a very different matter, and, indeed, seemed impossible. Helen made two attempts, but the branches swayed and rocked, and she could not get a spring from them. A day came when she tried again and did it, but that was in a case of life and death, with fire raging round. Now the need was not so supreme as to give the courage for the great risk.

“Well,” she said at last, with something like a sigh, “I suppose you had better shut the window, Milly, or you will be catching cold through my fault. And it is no good your waiting there any longer. I can’t manage this jump.”

Milly bad become conscious of the same fact, nevertheless she looked. greatly aghast when Helen herself confessed her helplessness. “Whatever are you going to do, then? ” she asked, half crying. “Shall I go and call the servants? ”

“No indeed,” was the hasty answer. “I shall stay here, and watch my opportunity to slip in at the back door when it is opened in the morning.”

“You’ll be frozen to death,” expostulated Milly, her own teeth chattering as she spoke; but a short “Nonsense” was the only reply to that declaration, and then the agile, daring young tomboy slipped down from the tree, and was lost to sight. Milly remained shivering at the open window for a few minutes longer, and then, with a doleful groan for her wilful companion, closed it softly and went back to bed. But she was not destined to get quiet rest just yet.

She had just laid herself down when she was startled by two sharp taps upon the window-pane. In five seconds she was back at her former post, and there was the handsome young face of her schoolfellow, beaming with fun and excitement, looking in at her. Helen had found the gardener’s ladder, which the boy had carelessly left out the previous evening, and it had not taken her long to reap the advantage of her discovery. In another minute she was once more safe on the floor of her room.

“And what will be said when the ladder is found up against this window in the morning? ” asked Milly, with a mingling of anxiety and-triumph.

“Jfot knowing can’t say,” was the cool answer, as Miss Nellie took a bundle of strong cord out of her drawer, and proceeded to unroll it, and pass one end round the top rung of the ladder. A good push outwards soon deposited the ladder quietly and safely beneath the tree, instead of up at the window, and ten minutes later the young maiden was sleeping as peacefully as if she were tjie most quiet young lady in the world. Both the girls ought to have caught bad colds; perhaps it was the excitement that saved them.

CHAPTER XIII.

AN HOUR IN JOSEPHINE’S STUDY.

“0 Rosie, Rosie, I cannot understand it. It is no good; my head won’t take it in.”

And, with a low cry of mingled weariness and despair, Josephine dropped her head on to two hands that for the past ten minutes had been resting on her knee, and turned her eyes to their owner’s face. As she did so a second cry escaped her, but with a very different accent in it from the last.

“Why, Helen Edison, is it you—is it you who have been kneeling by me so patiently for the past ten minutes? ”

“And why not? ” asked Helen, laughing. “Do you think, as Miss Rowe does, that it is utterly impossible for me to be quiet or sensible? ”

“I don’t think anything about you that Miss Rowe does,” was the quick answer. And then, still more quickly, “I mean, I think, I know you better than Miss Rowe does. She does not feel the kindness in yo\i as I do. But go now, please dear. You know no one is allowed to be here with me during recreation hours except Rosie, and I could hot bear you to get into another trouble oh my account. Please go.”

“Do you dislike my being here? ”

“Dislike! ” echoed Josephine wonderingly. “Don’t laugh at me, but, do you know, I feel sometimes as if looking at you was like looking at courage itself put into a real form. I shall feel* brave enough now to try once more to conquer that lesson when you are gone.”

“But I am not going,” said Helen, with a mischievous toss of her head, which gave way, however, at sight of her schoolfellow’s distress, to a quiet smile, as she added, “No, Josie, I am not going, if you like me to stay. Miss Crofton has given me leave to sit with you for half an hour four times a week.”

Josephine stared. “Given you leave! Do you mean that you have asked to spend your playtime in this dull little room!”

“I don’t think it is a dull little room,” was the answer, “with you and your books in it.

And, Josie, I’m going to ask you a favour. I

want to know if you will let me try to—-to-”

and the colour deepened in fearless Helen’s cheeks, and she stammered before poor stupid Josephine, who gazed at the phenomenon in speechless amazement.

“To ask me a favour?” she said at last. “That sounds too good to be true. Why, even Rosie scarcely ever thinks of asking me anything. What can you want that I can—at least that you think I can—do for you? ”

Helen got up from her knees, and going behind her companion’s chair made a necklace of her two arms round her companion’s neck as she replied in a low, rather hurried voice, so unlike her usual independent utterances—

“Please don’t be vexed with me, Josephine. I know I am ever so much younger than you, and idle, and not at all clever, but perhaps—if—do you think you would let me try to help you in your work a little sometimes? ”

For some moments there was no answer. All was silence in that dingy little lesson room. Then Helen stooped her head lower, laying her cheek gently on her companion’s head, as she whispered—

“Try to forget what I have said, Josie dear, and please to know, now and always, that I did not say it to hurt you. I will run away now.” And then, with one kiss on the pale cheek, she was turning hastily away, feeling painfully that she had added another sting to her schoolfellow’s dreary lot. She was soon undeceived. She had not set a second step before she was caught back, and held tightly, while Josephine’s weary, patient, hot eyes were cooled, for the first time for many months, with a refreshing flood of tears.

“Please don’t cry,” whispered Helen,, with fresh remorse.

“Oh! you don’t know how comfortable it is,” was the heartfelt answer. “I was only thinking, the other day, that perhaps I never should be able to cry any more. I seemed to have grown too dull and heavy.”

“Ah! That is just it,” exclaimed Helen Edison, suddenly recovering her spirits and animation when she found that her offer had, after all, been balm rather than a wound. “That is just it, Josephine, I am sure. You are not really dull and heavy; but you have been growing dull and heavy. Yes—that is the very thing I have been expecting.”

Josephine sat up, and left off crying to stare at her companion.

“0h, but, Helen, I really am dull and stupid.” “Don’t believe it,” was the short contradiction, accompanied by a shake of the curly head, and a smile. “You came to school after a life in India and a lot of illnesses, with no education; and you and the folks here set to work at once to pump into your brain babies’ learning, and children’s learning, and girls’ learning, and a lot of‘ finishing elegancies,’ as my nurse calls them, all at once. And I think you have all been just as wise as if you had put a freezing person into a doubly-heated hothouse, and kept on raising the temperature. First of all, the freezing creature would have suffered a horrible pain, as you did when you suddenly found how ignorant you were; and then he would have gradually got suffocated past all feeling, and ended by dying, as your wish to learn will end by dying, if you go on trying to do impossibilities, and finding, to your perpetual discouragement, that they won’t be mastered. And there now I There’s a long speech for you; but I mean it every bit, and I’ve been thinking it out to say to you for ever so many days past.”

“Have you?” said Josephine, looking up with a flickering smile. “Had you thought of the freezing man, and all? ”

“Oh, dear yes! ” was the laughing answer. “But I thought of half a dozen similes besides that. The frog, beginning modestly as a tadpole, and the butterfly as a grub, and heaps of others, only, as my half-hour is beginning to run short, perhaps I had better’ not waste time to tell you any more to-day. What work are you preparing for to-morrow? ”

“Trying to prepare, you mean,” corrected Josephine, sighing, but with something of a glimmer of hope struggling into her face, as she turned to the table at which she had been studyipg, and pulled a heap of books forward towards her schoolfellow. “For to-morrow I have a French exercise, with the rules to learn by heart; a German exercise, with the rules— oh, those dreadful rules—to learn by heart; a chapter of Roman history to be questioned on; a couple of pages of geography to learn by heart; these three dreadful Rule of Three sums to do, and I do not understand the rule one bit better now than when Miss Rowe explained it-”

“I don’t suppose you do, and much she cares,” muttered Helen, in interruption. Then she said, “But go on, please. Anything more?”

“Yes ; a chapter of Morris’s Heathen Mythology, and—and,” in a very low voice, “a page of spelling.”

“Ah!” said Helen calmly, as if she had not noticed the lowered tone nor the tinge of shame in poor Josephine’s cheeks. “Ah, what a clever idea of yours to learn that! Papa says that he has scarcely ever known a woman who spelt really correctly, and that it is a disgrace to our sex that it should be so. We won’t cut off that one of your lessons, at any rate, and I will learn it with you. But how many of the others do you expect to know properly? ”

“None,” answered Josephine, her wan face again overspreading with an expression of despair, which was startled away before it could grow very definite by Helen’s quick, dear voice retorting, coolly—r “No, I should just think not indeed! Nine months ago, you have told me yourself, you had forgotten every little bit of French you ever knew. German you had never looked at. Arithmetic the doctors had never let you touch, and if they could see you now I am certain they would continue the same veto. By-the-bye, was it the Rule of Three rules you were studying by the moonlight last night? ”

“Ye-” began Josephine, and then breaking off too startled to finish even that short affirmative. Her pale eyes darkened with wonder and some nervous anxiety as she asked, almost breathlessly—

“How do you know I was studying by moonlight? You could not have seen me through the keyhole, even if you would condescend to try, which I ain sure you would not.”

“I should think not indeed!” said Helen indignantly. Then, half laughing, she added, “Never mind troubling your head about how I gained my knowledge, Josie. If wise old Solomon were here just now, I expect he would repeat his proverb to you—‘A bird of the air shall carry the matter.’ ”

A mischievous smile passed over Miss Nellie’s face as she uttered the apt quotation, and joined to it a request that her companion would mention to no. one the fact of her having gained this knowledge, which Josephine began to put down to a clever guess, as every one in the school knew that she seized every possible and almost impossible time to study. Little she dreamt that the bright, beautiful eyes had been within a few inches of her during the night, and that they had brimmed over with sad tears for her sake. But she had little time just then for dreaming anything. Helen had come to the study to give help, and she was determined to render it without further loss of opportunity. Piling together and carrying to another table everything but the French books, the Roman History, and the spelling, she said quietly—

“Papa says one of the sins of the present day is a way people have fallen into of trying to make their brains tell falsehoods. They stuff a lot of things into their minds, and then tell their muddled brains to say they know them, when as a fact they really know no more about them properly than the man in the moon. I wonder which you would rather do, go on telling falsehoods, or begin to tell the truth? ”

Josephine looked shocked and hurt as she answered—

“0 Helen! the truth, you know. But indeed I have never told the falsehoods, nor let my brain tell them. I have known always that I knew nothing.”

“Then it is time you began to know something,” said Helen calmly, or rather with an outward appearance of calmness. Inwardly she was feeling very anxious. She knew that it would be utterly impossible to be of any real use to poor Josephine if she insisted on keeping up the accumulation of studies she had undertaken; but Helen much feared if she should have powers of persuasion strong enough to induce her schoolfellow to give up any item of what she had regarded hitherto as her duty. As usual, when Helen doubted herself, she fell to quoting her father’s thoughts, and once more they stood her in good stead. - Josephine consented to give up Professor Smith and the German governess, and then she and Helen set to work together at the Roman History, and before five minutes had passed Josephine had forgotten, for the first time since she had been at Crofton House, that she was engaged upon a difficult task.

CHAPTER XIV.

HAPPY LEARNING AND A DANGEROUS SWING.

“Oh dear I I do wish I had been a man in those days, and could have fought by the side of Hannibal! ” exclaimed Helen impulsively, as she and.her companion sat together reading. “Of course the Scipios were all very fine, but I almost hate them when I think of conquered Hannibal.”

“Do you?” murmured Josephine with vague wonder, and turning her eyes back to the page with a strange new interest. Hitherto Hannibal and Scipio, and all the other historical characters and events, had been little more real to her than the imaginary eight men who were engaged to build the house in her Rule of Three sum, or the x that represented the days in which they built it. Helen bad already taught her more than all she had yet learnt at school. But neither of the girls comprehended that, although Josephine gave a contented sigh when Helen at’ last shut the book, and said, gratefully—

“How pleasant this reading has been! Thanks to you, Helen, this lesson has been anything but a task. I really do hope I shall not give Miss Rowe so much trouble to-morrow as I generally do.”

“As to that,” said Helen, returning to her defiant mood, “that is the only thing I am sorry about. Horrid creature! However, I daresay I can find out some way to be aggravating, so as to make up.”

“0 Helen! ” began Josephine, almost angrily; then she suddenly relapsed into silence; and when Helen came back from the bookcase she found her companion with her arms on the table, her head resting on them, and crying bitterly.

Helen stood still for a few moments uncertain what to do. At last she bent over her schoolfellow, and whispered softly—

“Are these, too, comfortable tears, like those others?”

“No, no!” murmured Josephine in a broken voice. “I am crying now because I am too stupid to help you; and oh! I wish I could.”

“Help me—how? ” inquired Helen, in a tone of surprise. “To get the better of Miss Rowe, do you mean? ”

“To get the better of yourself,” said Josephine, in a low, earnest tone. And yet you are so kind, so generous, so pleasant!

“Oh!” ejaculated Helen sharply. And then there was a long silence.

Josephine, leaning forward over the table, her face buried in her, hands, was praying humbly, childishly—but oh how earnestly!— for power to help her friend.

Helen sat down, and appeared to be studying the French grammar. At last she said somewhat abruptly—

“Did you really mean just now, Josephine, that part of your care to know your history was to save that tigress, Miss Rowe, trouble? ” Josephine half turned, and took one of her companion’s slim, little, white hands in hers.-“Please, Helen, to please me, do not call her such names. But of course I should be glad to save her trouble. Her life must be hard enough without our adding to its burdens.”

“That would be all very well,” retorted Helen hotly, “if she were kind and pleasant, like Miss Crofton and Mademoiselle,’ or just like Fraulein; but she is spiteful and unjust and cruel.”

“You judge her very hardly,” said Josephine, in a low tone. “But if she really is all that, then we should do good to them that despite-fully use us and persecute us.”

“You are laughing! ” said Helen scornfully.

“Laughing! ” exclaimed Josephine, now fairly lifting her tear-stained face, and turning it to her companion. “Laughing about our Saviour’s words! 0 Helen! how can you think I could be so wicked, so—ungrateful! ”

There was a tender, loving pathos in that last slowly uttered word that impressed the hearer more than a dozen sermons could have done. There was a slight flush on Helen’s face when she replied—

“Well, not laughing perhaps; but—of course —at least I mean if you feel like that, I don’t.

I don’t set up for being awfully good. I didn’t know you did, or I wouldn’t have shocked you.” “But I don’t,” said Josephine timidly; “I only try to take His comforting offer—‘Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, . . . and ye shall find rest unto your souls.’ ”

“Humph,” grunted Helen; “but I don’t pretend to be meek and lowly. If any one makes an enemy of me let them look out. I warn them, as far as I am concerned, it’s all to fear and no favour. You find it hard to learn German and arithmetic. But I should find it a great deal harder to learn this meek and mild business, and I don’t want to either.”

“And yet it is such happy learning,” murmured Josephine, and a light came over the wan, worn face such as Helen had never yet seen on the countenance of any one. She felt awed by it.

But being awed was not being subdued, and she was not sorry when the door opened and Miss Crofton appeared, saying with a slight tinge of reproach in her voice—

“Miss Edison, my dear, you have forgotten your promise. You have been here an hour instead of the half-hour for which I gave permission. You will not keep those rosy cheeks long if you give up taking plenty of exercise.”

Helen took hey schoolmistress’s hand and laid her cheek down on it in the peculiar caressing way she had with any one for whom she had a special liking.

“Don’t be vexed just this once, please, Madam. Josephine has been turning the tables on me. When we had finished our reading she tried to reward me by teaching me something else.”

Miss Crofton looked inquiringly at her eldest pupil, but she only caught a glimpse of a very wistful expression on the downcast face, and she never forced confidence.

“Whatever Josephine tries to teach you, you will do well to learn, my child,” she said gently “But run away now, it will be preparation-time before you have had one dance or game of battledore.”

“Oh, those are not my last favourites,” exclaimed Helen, with an instant change of manner, and starting up. “What do you think I did yesterday? I believe it would be thought splendid even for a boy. You know the chairs in the hall!”

“Yes, my - dear, certainly,” replied Miss Crofton, looking somewhat bewildered by the unexpected and abrupt interrogation. “What about the chairs?”

“Why, do you know, back to back, I actually jumped over them both. Not one of the others could come near me. Do just come and see me do it again, please! I should like you to so much.”

“I daresay, indeed,” was the answer, with an irrepressible laugh; “and I should so much like not to. I should expect to see you break your legs. You are the queerest mixture of girl, woman, baby, and tomboy I ever met with.”

“Not much of a baby,” half pouted Miss Nellie.

“Indeed, young lady! Pray who sent an order yesterday down to Jeffrey’s, by Jem, for a shilling’s worth of hardbake and lemon drops? ”

Helen laughed and blushed. “Papa says all good-tempered people like sweet things. And I’ve been going without so long that I was beginning to be afraid I might turn sour. But I did try to find you to ask permission before I sent for them, only you had gone out.”

“Yes, and luckily for you both I met your messenger outside the shop, and he very properly told me of hi3 commission and handed me your purchases.”

“If he had not told you, you don’t suppose that I should not have done so the first opportunity I got, do you? ” asked Helen, with mingled anxiety and indignation. “You don’t think I should be so intensely unladylike as to get the servants to do things for me I would not have you know I I do many little things myself that I would rather you did not find out, but I don’t descend to getting the servants or any one else to help me in them.”

“No, my dear, I do not think you are capable of such an act,” said Miss Crofton gravely, whilst her eyes rested on the girl’s flushed cheeks. “But why,” she added after a moment’s pause, “if you have this strong sense of honour in some respects, do you ever allow yourself to do behind my back what you would not do to my face! ”

“Oh, that’s quite a different thing, you see,” was the saucy answer. “If I were a man I’d belong to the Alpine Club, and climb the Matterhorn the most dangerous side I could find, without a guide, and I’d hunt tigers in Bengal jungles, and go looking for the North Pole; but as I can’t do any of those things, the only pleasure left to me is to get into scrapes and what little nice difficulties I can invent for myself.”

“Dear me! ” said Miss Crofton, with a very deep and genuine sigh. “You really make me almost wish that I had never undertaken the charge of you, or that your three years here had come to an end.”,

“Oh, but you won’t send me away!” exclaimed Helen, terrified at the earnest tone. “Pray don’t. I can’t promise to be quiet and smooth and proper like Clara Boswell. I should pine away into an idiot, I know, if I tried. But I do like you and Josephine and little Bosie so much, so very much; please don’t want me gone. it—it sounds—cruel of you!”

There were tears in the bright eyes, and the bright face was hastily turned away to hide them.

“Don’t grieve,” .said Josephine softly, coming forward, and putting her arm around her young schoolfellow. “Miss Crofton does not mean that she quite really wishes you away.”

“No indeed,” said the Principal, kissing both her pupils. “I should indeed greatly miss your joyous face, my child; but you do make my anxieties greater than they have ever been before.”

“I am so sorry! ” was the penitent ejaculation; and five minutes later, the rain having ceased, and the girls trooped into the garden, Miss Crofton felt her heart leap upwards as she saw Helen Edison flying backwards and forwards in the air, clinging by her hands only to the bottom of the swing, the upper strings of which she had shortened considerably to suit her purpose, while she kept shouting to her companions who held the side ropes, “Higher, higher I ”

“Stop! ” exclaimed Miss Crofton, running out through her French window. “Stop, stop! she will fall! she will be killed!”

The startled girls stopped, clutched at their schoolfellow, and almost the next moment there was a heap of arms, and heads, and frocks, and feet tumbled pell-mell on the ground. As one bit of the heap struggled upwards a voice exclaimed, with a ripple of silver laughter—

“0 Madam! you did spoil a beautiful swing in a dangerous way I ”

CHAPTER XV.

HELEN’S EXERCISE-BOOK.

It was preparation-time again. Josephine and Rosa Bell had been away three days, and Helen missed them very much, although a letter received that morning from the two sisters had been some satisfaction to her.

Miss Rowe had received a letter by the same post, with the same postmark, and as she sat at her desk in the quiet class room she dropped her work into her lap and. drew it from her pocket for the fourth or fifth time since the morning. And as she read, with moistened eyes and a softened face, she became altogether oblivious of the crowd of young scholars by whom she was surrounded, until a titter from the farther side of the long table jarred upon her nerves and startled her back to recollection.

She raised her head quickly. All tenderness and gentleness had died away, as she exclaimed, angrily—

“Miss Wilmot, what are you about? Is that the way you attend to your lessons? And you too, Miss Trew. Miss Boswell, you will have the goodness to claim fines from both of them.”

At that moment unfortunate Milly exploded with another titter, winding up, in her attempts to restrain herself, with a peculiar convulsive squeak, which was too much for the nerves of every one but the enraged governess.

“How dare you laugh at what I say!” she cried passionately. “I will inform Miss Crofton of your impertinence.”

“I—I,” began Milly, stammering.

“She wasn’t laughing at you,” interrupted Helen. “She was laughing at something I showed her.”

“And what was that? ”

“Something of mine.”

“I asked you what it was,” repeated Miss Rowe, with increased anger. “Show it to me at once.”

“I would rather not,” was the cool reply. “It is only one of my drawings, and you don’t appreciate them. Pass it back, Kate Morley.”

“Pass it to me! ” exclaimed the governess imperiously. And starting forward as she spoke she took advantage of the girl’s momentary hesitation to gain possession of the book, and five seconds later it, with all its contents of exercises and drawings, was ascending in flames and smoke up the class-room chimney.

Helen sprang to her feet, and for the minute looked as furious as her governess.

Then the passion gave way to a mocking smile, and she said, with a sneer most repulsive on her fair young face, “I am glad the likeness was so good. It was clever of me to get it so well, wasn’t it?”

Miss Rowe left the room, and shortly returned with the Principal, who looked very gravely annoyed as she walked up to Helen Edison, and said, “Miss Edison, I am greatly grieved to hear such a serious charge brought against you. I had no idea that you could condescend to deliberately insult a lady. That you could be aggravating, tiresome, very trying in many ways, I knew, and I have not been much troubled on that score. I trusted to time and your innate common-sense to cure you, in due course, of those blemishes in your character. But I have never hitherto supposed you capable of doing anything absolutely unladylike. There is something of meanness, too, in trying to involve others in a feeling of ill will that you may yourself choose to indulge.”

Helen’s cheeks flushed hotly as, with lowered head, she replied, “I had not thought of all this. I only did it for fun at the moment.”

“When people choose to foster enmity they very seldom do think of anything but their own bad passions,” replied Miss Crofton. “But now, as I see you are sorry, I hope Miss Rowe will accept your penitence without any more being said, and that I shall never again hear of your pencil causing such just annoyance.”

And then Miss Crofton went away, and her pupils once more subsided into their places, Milly whispering, “There, Nelly, you’ll never be able to put human beings’ heads on to animals’ bodies again.”

“Not real human beings,” corrected Helen. “What was the drawing?” whispered the next neighbour but one to Kate Morley, to her neighbour.

“A cat sitting up weeping over a broken birch rod, with a group of kittens round her, and the cat’s face was Miss Rowe’s; she was holding a letter, too, in one paw, and looking very sentimental”

“Nelly is much more like a boy than a girl,” said Rose Trew. “But really it is too bad of her now, for Miss Rowe has been much more patient the last day or two, and I do really think she must be going to be ill.”

At this moment Miss Eowe exclaimed, in anything but a patient tone, “Silence, or I will fine you all! ”

Helen’s insult had undone all the good caused by Josephine’s gentleness and meek sympathy. Miss Rowe was harder than ever. But none would have been more cut to the heart than Helen herself, could she have known the moment she had chosen to make the young governess an object of ridicule to her pupils. To Miss Rowe herself it made her untoward pupil’s act appear one of actual barbarity, and dislike leapt at once into absolute hatred.

Just when Milly Wilmot’s titter had withdrawn her attention from her letter Miss Rowe had been dwelling for about the tenth time upon the words, “Do, please, tell Helen Edison about dear, pretty little Harry. You would find she is so different from what you think. If only you would give her this letter to read, you would find that she would begin to love little Harry so much that you would both get to be friends directly, and she will be so sorry then that she has ever worried you.”

As Miss Rowe sat bending over the letter that was so filled with pleasant news, kind words, and tender sympathy, she felt that for the writer’s sake she would even give heed to that simple pleading, and try whether Josephine’s recipe would turn an enemy into a friend. Josephine’s patience and humility had made a difference in her, so it might be possible that trust and a plea for sympathy might win Helen Edison.

Then came those smothered laughs, and the discovery of the mocking caricature, and, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, Miss Rowe felt that she would much rather have Helen’s hatred than her affection, and that it would be desecration to her beloved little brother’s name even to breathe it to such a “detestable girl.”

CHAPTER XVI.

BREAKING THE RULES.

“What are you about, Helen? Oh do, please, tell me! At least, no—I mean, don’t.”

Helen started violently, hastily pushed a drawer to, and jumped up from the chair in front of it, on which she had been seated.

“0 Rose! how you frightened me!” she exclaimed, in a tone in which displeasure and relief were pretty equally blended. “Why are you here? Don’t you know that you have no business in this room? ”

“It’s not my fault, Helen; indeed it’s not,” faltered poor Rose, almost overwhelmed by the stem voice of the schoolfellow who was generally so good to her. “And I did give just two little coughs outside on purpose to let you know, as I wasn’t to rap.”

“What do you mean? ” asked Helen, looking thoroughly mystified. “Why were you not to rap? Who said that you were not to?. And what have you come for? ”

“I have come to tell you that you have been upstairs a great deal too long, and that you are to come down. Miss Rowe sent me, you know, Helen. And she said that I was not to rap. She made me promise not, but just to walk right in, and then tell her what I saw you doing.”

Helen’s eyes flashed. “Just like her, the— the—sneak! There! that’s the only right word for her; but don’t you use it, Rosie, because it’s horribly ugly—almost as ugly as the thing it means. And now run downstairs, and say that I am coming directly. I will tell you to-morrow what I was about when you came in.”

“No, please don’t,” said the child, looking up with a grateful smile. “Of course I should like to know, because you seemed to have got such a heap of pretty ribbon and things in the drawer; but I would really rather that you did not say, because Miss Rowe would be sure to make me tell her, you know.”

“All right, Trots,” was the calm answer.

“We’ll risk that to-morrow, for I certainly will get leave from Miss Crofton for you to come and have a peep into that ribbon-drawer yourself as a bit of a birthday treat. But hark! there is that‘loud, sweet voice’ calling us. You will come in for a scolding too if I keep you any longer.”

So saying, Helen gave her schoolfellow a gentle little push towards the stairs, and shouted down them, “Coming! ” Then she flew back to her room, lifted a light dress out of a lower drawer, and, opening the one of whose contents Bose had caught a glimpse, she quickly laid the dress in it over everything, put a necktie or two and a pair of gloves on the top of the dress, and then murmuring to herself with a smile, “Miss Bowe won’t learn much now, I imagine, to satisfy her curiosity if she opens my drawers,” she also ran down to the large classroom.

She found herself almost face to face with the English governess when she entered.

“At last!” said Miss Bowe, with cold anger. “You very nearly gave me the trouble, Miss Edison, of coming to fetch you myself.”,

“That would have been tiresome for you, but a comfort to me,” said Helen coolly; “for if you had come up I should not have had to come down. I have only come now to tell you that I hope for the future you will not teach the youngest here to break the rules of the school.

If I were not so fond of little Rose yonder I should have taken her just now, when she came into my room contrary to orders, and locked her in Miss Crofton’s room, and left her there as punishment till Miss Crofton herself came home to scold her. And I should have kept the key in my pocket. And,” she added significantly, “I am pretty strong, and being only a schoolgirl, I have no dignity to lose in a scuffle. Now I am going upstairs again.”

“Stay where you are! ” shouted Miss Rowe, furiously.

. During her pupil’s long speech she had stood as one petrified. To say that for a while she could not believe her own ears would be only feebly to express the truth of her strange state of feelings as Helen went on speaking. From her very childhood she had been accustomed to much deference. She could be kind enough even now-a-days to those who submitted implicitly to her rule, but every one must submit; and that one of those girls over whom, from the circumstances of the case, she had naturally exercised an unusually complete sway, should dare to assert an open defiance appeared for some breathless moments to be absolutely out of the bounds of possibility.

As long as Helen Edison remained still, and continued to speak in her calm, even tones, so long her hearer clung desperately to the bewildered belief that she must be dreaming a disgraceful, impossible dream. But when Helen, with her final words, turned to leave the room the spell was broken, and, almost beside herself with passion, Miss Rowe sprang forward and seized her by the shoulder, shouting, “Stay where you are, you impertinent girl, and don’t dare to move until I give you leave! You shall stand there as an example to your companions as long as I choose! ”

“I shall do no such thing,” retorted Helen, suddenly flinging herself free from the clasp. And then, folding her arms and drawing herself up to the utmost of her slim height, she stood, with flashing, scorn Pul eyes, confronting the governess.

“Don’t dare to lay a finger on me again,” she said, in a low, hard voice. “I shall strike you if you do. You rouse everything that is bad in my nature. I am going back to my room now, because I have had Miss Crofton’s leave to be there these two hours before tea. But if I had not had leave I should have to go there now to try to get back patience to be with you.”

And so saying the girl once more turned slowly, passed through the open door, closed it quietly behind her, and was gone, leaving a dead silence to follow her departure.

Miss Rowe was, for once in her life, conquered, and with the additional mortification of being surrounded by those who were likely to rejoice in her intense humiliation. At this thought she looked quickly towards the long table surrounded with its crowd of rosy-faced, brighteyed workers. All heads were raised from the crewels, darning, and hemming, and she caught glances passing from schoolfellow to schoolfellow significant of amusement and delight. That was the last drop. Her wrath quite mastered her. She flew upstairs after Helen, and furiously turned the handle of the door. The:,door moved about a quarter of an inch, and then stuck fast.

Helen Edison had not experimented, and speculated, and read up all manner’ of queer bits of information for nothing. She was full of all sorts of resources for all sorts of occasions. Just now she wanted to ensure having the room to herself,for a little while, and so she had improvised a wedge under the door, keys being unknown luxuries to the pupils’ bedrooms. And her wedge proved such a success that not all Miss. Rowe’s angry shaking forced it from its place, or drove the door over it.

At last the governess went off to her own room, fetched the key thence, and finding that it fitted this other lock as well as the one to which it rightly belonged, she felt that she had at length gained some poor little triumph when, she pulled Helen’s door close again, locked it from the outside, and then called through, “Since you wish to stay in your room, there you shall stay without your tea, and until it is time for those who share it with you to come in to get ready for bed.”

Then she hurried away downstairs with the key in her pocket; but she was not able to go fast enough to avoid hearing her pupil’s mocking “Thank you,” exclaimed in answer to her information.

Miss Rowe would perhaps have been a good deal surprised could she have known how her adversary was occupied when she followed, her upstairs. Having gained the room, and secured the door, Helen had flung herself on her knees by her bedside and broken into silent but bitter sobbing, that shook her from head to foot.

“0 God! forgive me for getting into these fierce passions!” she murmured, imploringly. “Oh! forgive me. Help me to conquer myself. However mischievous I may be, oh! help me to get rid of these awful fits of passion! ”

And while she was so praying, ad thus struggling with herself, the governess had come up, and well-nigh thrown her back into her former hard, vengeful state of temper. She rose from her knees.

“Ah, well! It’s no use to pray to be good, or even tolerable,” she muttered with a sort of sullen despair, “while I have to be in the same house with that creature.”

With this decision she walked over to the drawer at which she had been occupied ten minutes or so since when Rosa Bell interrupted her, drew up her chair again, and was very soon once more deep in the work over which she had begged, and readily obtained, kind Miss Crofton’s permission to spend the working afternoon quietly hidden in the bedroom. She paid no apparent heed to the beating and shaking at the door, and only troubled herself to open her lips once when she called out that exasperating cool “Thank you.”

CHAPTER XVII.

A DOLL FOR LITTLE ROSA, AND A GOOD TEA.

When Helen Edison had learnt from Josephine and Rosa Bell that it was quite impossible, according to all usual calculations, that Rosa should get any letters or presents, any single loving word or message of any kind, from her parents on her birthday, and when she had seen the big team welling up into Rosa’s big blue eyes as the child sighed over the sorrowful fact, Helen had privately decided that at all events something or other should be done to turn the anniversary into a féte day for the poor little thing.

She made up her mind, in the first place, that from the morning of that birthday Rosa should no longer be that doleful being, a toyless child, and, furthermore, she resolved to do her best to persuade Miss Crofton into letting the day be a general holiday. In consequence of her first resolve, she seized the opportunity of being allowed one afternoon to go on a shopping expedition with Fiaulein, to spend two-and-sixpence on a fine golden-haired doll. Then she bought a yard or two of rose-coloured satteen, some white muslin, a little remnant of black satin, and several yards of blue ribbons of various widths; and with all these treasures she returned to the school, her dark face glowing with happiness.

. Kind-hearted Fraulein undertook the conversion of the rose satteen and black satin into an elegant promenade costume, while Helen determined somehow or other to find time to make the underclothes and the white muslin frock. But Helen’s mother and Helen herself were very ambitious for her, and she had a great many classes, the work for which, in spite of quickness and cleverness, took a great deal of time. Thus it came to pass, that when the afternoon before the birthday arrived the doll’s evening dress and all the rolls of blue ribbon were still untouched.

Even now the affair would not have been so desperate but for the natural desire to keep the whole mater secret from Rosa until the morrow, and the time between her going to bed and the general retirement would certainly not be sufficient for the completion of the millinery. Under these circumstances, Helen began to feel rather hopeless of being able to give her present in its intended glory, until she suddenly bethought her of asking leave to spend the usual Wednesday afternoon working hours upstairs, where she could cut out and arrange at her ease.

Helen had caught Miss Crofton just as she was on the point of going out on a visit for the remainder of the day, and had not only obtained the leave she begged, to be allowed to spend her afternoon in her room in Rosa’s service, but also a promise that the holiday should be “thought about,” and the girl bad flown off to her roll of muslin and ribbons in the best possible of happy humours. She would have found and told Miss Rowe of the permission granted her but that it happened she had met Fraulein, who offered to relieve her of what she considered an unpleasant duty. Unfortunately, Fraulein went back to her room, before fulfilling her promise, to give a finishing touch to a diminutive pair of boots which she had also manufactured out of the black satin, and all the miserable fracas had taken place long before she appeared in the schoolroom.

“But why did you not send down word by Rose that you were permitted to stay up here? ” whispered Fraulein through the keyhole a few minutes before tea, when she had learnt her favourite’s imprisonment, and had failed to move Miss Rowe to end it She had hastened upstairs at once to express her deep sorrow that such a misfortune should have occurred through her dilatoriness.

“Misfortune, do you call it ?” exclaimed Helen through the door. “I call it the finest piece of good fortune that could have happened to me. Only fancy getting four hours’ perfect quiet to do what one likes with. And I am very glad to have escaped the walk besides, for I did not feel at all inclined for it. I expect Miss Rowe would have made me walk with her, and then she would have tried to irritate me into speaking to her. It would have been worse than playing a game of * Old Soldier ’ when one is not in the humour for it.”

Fraulein gave a ghost of a laugh. She began to believe that the prisoner was not seriously pining under captivity.

“But, ach! mein liebes Kind! ” she whispered again, after a few moments’ pause, and iu a tone of despair. “She says that you shall have no tea, not even ein butter brod. That is too cruel.”

“Too cruel, indeed,” repeated Helen, scornfully. “Ah! you don’t know her, Fiaulein. Nothing is too cruel for her. But wait a moment.” Hitherto Helen had been standing, during this little dialogue, by the bed nearest the door that she might continue her dressmaking. But she now dropped the half-made frock on to it, and, turning, put her lips to the keyhole of the door and whispered through as cautiously as the German governess herself had done before.

“Fraulein.”

“Ja, meine Liebe?”

“You can hear me, Fraulein? ”

“But, yes, surely, mein Kind.”

“Well then, Fraulein, I confess that I am beginning to feel hungry—I mean more hungry than usual, for I think I could any time of the day eat up a quartern loaf, like the Blue-coat Boy, if I had his luck to get the chance, and I wouldn’t ask for the raspberry jam either.”

Again Fraulein laughed softly, but murmured at the same time, “Armes Kind.”

“Yes,” whispered Helen, also laughing, “that is what I begin to feel like, a poor starved child; and as I am reduced to this condition by only Miss Rowe’s orders, I see no reason why I should go on suffering. Do you? ”

“No, assuredly. But how to help it! I have begged and begged for you, for your release, or for your meal to bring to you, but in vain.”

“So much the better. It will be the more fun having it up here.”

Fraulein shook her hands helplessly, and looked ready to cry as she whispered back almost impatiently, “It might be if you could. But I tell you she won’t let you have it anywhere.” “But I will,” replied Helen resolutely, “if .you will help me only just one little bit. You know these windows cannot be seen from either the dining-hall or the kitchen; s6 if you will just please find Louise, and ask her to run round the garden till she comes beneath this room,‘I will manage all the rest; I have a very long piece of string here.”

“A very—long-” began Franlein, wonderingly. And then a light suddenly broke over her face, and she exclaimed joyfully, “Ach, ja! I see. That will do so beautifully! ”

In her gladness she momentarily forgot her hitherto prudently lowered voice, but fortunately it was of no consequence, as every one was already gathered downstairs in readiness for tea, the bell for which rang at this moment, and Fraulein rushed off instantly to find the good-tempered, ready-witted French housemaid, who was to provide that wilful, headstrong, generous-hearted Helen Edison with the food she had been sentenced to forego, and without which poor simple Fraulein imagined that she would certainly faint or fall ill.

As Helen heard the footsteps of the German. governess receding down the corridor she got up from her knees, and taking her needlework she carried it with her to one of the windows, where she plied her needle quickly, but kept at any rate as much as half an eye on the garden below.

She was beginning to fear that one or other of her hoped-for- allies had been intercepted in the attempt to aid her, or that their hearts had failed them, when the welcome sound of a somewhat subdued but merry little French song came to her ears, and the next moment she caught sight of the becoming snowy-white cap through the trees. Darting to one of her drawers she took out a carefully treasured coil of string, loosened the end, and got back to the window just as smiling Louise arrived beneath it.

“Vite, Ma’am’selle, vite. Dépê chez vous,” cried the French girl softly. “They will be coming out, the chocolate took so long.”

“Chocolate! did. you say chocolate? ” laughed Helen, as she hastily let down her string for Louise’s basket. “Ah 1 that was that dear, good Fiaulein’s thought, I know. But mamma shall send her such a good present next Christmas; and you too, Louise.”

“Oh! how good it smells I ” as she carefully drew up the basket to the edge of the window, and then putting out her other hand, she lifted it over the ledge and examined the contents.

A little jugful of steaming rich chocolate, a couple of rounds of hot buttered toast, and a piece of German honey bread.

“Well, I never!” murmured Miss Helen, her crimson lips curling with a merry mischievous little smile as she bent over her provisions. “Well, I never! I am rather afraid, if this is prisoner’s fare, that I shall endeavour to be locked up again from time to time when I feel that my constitution, if not the calendar, requires a feast day.”

Thus looking to the future, she drew her chair up to the broad window-sill and began to eat, Louise waiting down below meanwhile, and from minute to minute adjuring her rather anxiously to be quick, lest they should be discovered.

In spite of all Helen’s efforts to yield obedience to this prayer, and her courage in scalding her mouth with the hot chocolate, frightened Louise only escaped being found out in her act of benevolence by overcoming her usual repugnance to earwigs and caterpillars, and creeping through the shrubbery instead of going round it; for just as she had once more got the basket, with the empty jug and plate, safely in her hand, the English governess came out from tea, and walked directly round to that part of the garden overlooked by the culprit’s windows, as though the idea had occurred to her that some attempt might be made to relieve the garrison.

But all Miss Rowe saw was her locked-up pupil standing by an open window, her elbows on the sill, her chin resting on her little white hands, and her large dark eyes apparently gazing disconsolately into space.

As a matter of fact, the large dark eyes were gazing delightedly at Louise’s clever escape;. .And just as that amusement had come to an end, Helen withdrew her head again into the room, attracted by a little rustling noise at the door. As she turned the noise ceased, and in the small space between floor and door was a part of a sheet of white paper visible. She ran forward quickly and picked it up, muttering cautiously as she did so, “All right,” in case there were any ears still lingering to hear her.

A soft sigh without answered her, and then she heard some one stealing swiftly away. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked curiously at the sheet of paper. There was no writing on it, but there was a certain amount of thickness and weight about it.

“Something inside,” muttered Helen, and with some difficulty she opened it. And there certainly was something inside—a something which fully accounted for the sticking together of the two halves of the sheet of paper.

Inside the paper were several very watery scraps of bread and butter, very much squeezed by being pushed under the door, and besides the bread and butter were a few words of writing in poor Josephine’s scrawly, uncertain hand— “I am so sorry I cannot give you any more. I would have given you all my tea if I could—so would a number of us—only Miss Rowe kept looking round at all of us all tea-time, as if she guessed what we wanted to do. I could only manage to cut off these little bits, and I had put the sheet of paper ready in my apron pocket. Oh! I do so hope they’ll be better than nothing.”

“A great deal better than nothing,” murmured the girl gently, as she read the simple, loving words, and the tears slowly rose in her proud young eyes, and rolled down the cheeks which the English governess could only make colour with haughtiness or passion. “A great deal better than nothing, poor, kind Josephine,” she murmured again, “because of the love they telL And I almost wish,” she added, a smile beginning to glimmer through the tears, “that I had not just eaten that splendid feast, which makes me now a little disinclined for this second meal.”

She eyed the squashed atoms of bread and butter sticking to the greasy paper for some time, tears and smiles alternately in her eyes, till at last merriment gained the day, and she broke into one of those silvery laughs which seemed to have some pleasant infection in them, for even sedate Clara Boswell used to smile, in spite of herself, when the musical sweet sounds fell upon her ears. The only person they gladdened now was little Rose, who had been lingering as near as she dared to the forbidden, and now flew down to the class-rooms to tell the astonishing but delightful piece of news to all who were likely to show due sympathy.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PRINCIPAL’S PERPLEXITIES.

As Helen laughed she folded and laid-by Josephine’s gift, to be bestowed at some convenient moment upon the birds, and then, having washed her hands, she resumed her task upon the doll’s frock with all possible haste, for, to tell the truth, it was by no means as far advanced as might have been expected from the long undisturbed afternoon she had been at liberty to bestow upon it.

The fact was, that for more than an hour after Miss Rowe had locked the door upon her, Helen had neglected the doll millinery altogether, and devoted her clever, nimble fingers to the manufacture of instruments of revenge upon her enemy. But with these the reader may meet in due time. Nothing more ’ need be said about them at present but that they proved eminently satisfactory to their maker, and that they were carefully packed in a paper box, and hidden away at the very bottom of a drawer for future purposes.

“Good-night,” whispered Rose through the keyhole at eight o’clock, as she passed the door on her way to her own room.

“Good - night,” answered Helen cheerfully. “You shall see something so pretty in my drawer to-morrow, Rosie. Pleasant dreams to you meantime.”

And the child did have pleasant dreams, for she could not help beginning to have a little faint suspicion in her mind that the bright ribbons in Helen’s drawer might have something to do with her. She had wished one day that the brown ribbons on her white muslin evening pinafores were a prettier colour. Perhaps Helen was going to change them for her to-morrow, had changed one already perhaps, for her to wear on her birthday. Or perhaps she had made her a pretty white pocket-handkerchief-case, tied across with blue ribbons like her own.

Rose thought of a dozen possible things, but she never came, even in her sleep, near what she would have supposed the quite impossible vision of beauty now lying fully dressed in Helen Edison’s middle drawer.

All the neat little garments were made to take off, and even lace-trimmed handkerchiefs, and white kid shoes made out of a white kid glove and trimmed with blue rosettes, had not been forgotten; whilst the dainty muslin frock, with the broad piece of lace over blue silk down the front, and slashed sleeves over blue, was decidedly tasteful enough to justify Helen’s touch of vanity as she looked at it in the fading light.

When it grew dark no candle was brought her, and so, with one sigh over the lesson-books and girls downstairs, she shut the doll’s drawer, undressed, and went to bed, where she very soon fell fast asleep, and dreamt that Miss Rowe had got the doll out of its resting-place, had torn all its clothes to rags, and was now smashing its arms and legs, with Rose standing by crying bitterly at the destruction.

“How can you be so mean, so barbarously cruel!” exclaimed Helen, starting forward to snatch her doll; but some one gently put her back, saying—“Hush, dear! The tyrant is not here. Don’t be frightened. Go to sleep again.” And then she was kissed by a pair of soft, clinging lips.

Whether all this also was part of her dream Helen never knew; but the next morning she looked curiously at grave, self-contained Clara Boswell,, wondering whether she had very soft lip3, and whether, perhaps, under certain circumstances, she could speak in a very tender, caressing voice. If she had been able to ask a little blind sister whom Miss Boswell had at home, she would have received a “yes” to both her questions; but she could not, and so her doubts were never solved.

But we are getting on too fast, and must go back a little. When Miss Crofton came home at night in time for the family prayers, as was her invariable custom during the term-time, Miss Rowe heard her ring,‘and at once hastened to her to give her version of the afternoon’s disturbance, before any one else should have a chance of relating it in a way that should help to turn the balance of. forgiveness in the pupil’s favour instead of in her own.

As the English governess put the case it certainly looked very black against the pupil. She had remained up in the bedroom a very long time, contrary to rules; she had not .condescended to give any reason, or, for a long time, to confess that she had leave. When she was sent for she had insolently taken her time before coming down; and when at length she had come down, she had used the most impertinent and insulting language to Miss Howe before the whole school, finally defying her to keep her downstairs, as she chose to be up, and then ending by fastening her door against her. > “When things came to that pass I locked her in,” said Miss Rowe, “and there she is now.”

“Locked her in? ” repeated Miss Crofton, questioningly. “But, pray, how could you lock her in? There are no keys in the young ladies* doors.”

The governess clasped her hands rather tightly as she replied, quickly, “No; but I fetched the key from my own door, and fortunately that fitted.”

“And so, Miss Rowe, you set the example to my servants and pupils of trying locks and fitting wrong keys into doors,” said the Principal coldly. “You have been guilty of a bitter want of prudence, if of nothing worse. But it is time for prayers. You had better return to the classroom ; I will follow you in a few moments.”

And with scowling brow and lowering face the governess went out, and left the harassed schoolmistress alone to think over this latest subject of annoyance. Poor thing! It did seem hard that whilst paying three resident governesses, all of them as old as she was when she began schoolkeeping, she could yet never venture to allow herself a little relaxation during the term without feeling almost certain to have to pay dearly for it, by learning of some mischance when she returned home that had occurred during her absence.

The last time she spent an evening out that delicate girl, Lucy Wentworth, had been allowed to laugh and cry herself into hysterics because a mischievous companion had hidden a toad in her desk. The time before that poor Josephine had been left so long alone in the little class-room poring over her books that she had fallen asleep with the candle before her, and only woke up when a great lock of hair was burnt off one side of her head, making her look a perfect sight for months to come.

“Yes,” thought the hard-worked schoolkeeper, “it certainly does seem to be the fact that, excepting during the month at Christmas and the six weeks at summer, I ought never to leave the house. For if I only go for a walk I generally find that the servants have got into some mischief, half-cut their fingers off, or broken all the plates, or cracked a dozen of the tumblers, or dropped a spoon down the well, or quarrelled, so that they are determined not to stop in the house with each other, or something. There’s sure to be something; and now there is this I Oh dear!”

That sigh came from the very depths of a sorely oppressed heart. People said that Miss Crofton was making money, and so she was. She had need make money, for she had taken upon herself to support the three orphan children of a dead brother and their invalid mother. And if her school income failed her they must all be reduced to beggary. But she sometimes felt as though picking oakum, without cares, in the workhouse would be preferable to this life of ceaseless harass and anxiety.

And how little any one sympathised with her! If she were weary, or quiet, or dull at meals or in the drawing-room in the evening, her pupils considered her cross and disagreeable, and were secretly conscious that she was not doing her duty by them. If she forced pleasant looks upstairs, and vented some of her troubled feelings downstairs, in sterner inspection or sharper orders than usual, there were barely smothered growls as to people being sugar in sitting-rooms and vinegar iu the kitchen; and if she had occasion to complain of the way in which classes were held or any other duties performed by her masters or governesses, faces said as plainly as tongues could have done that it was all very fine to be in command, and have the liberty of finding fault; that was easy work; it was a pity that the tables could not have been turned sometimes.

The Principal, of Crofton House most earnestly wished, as she sat there cogitating in her private sitting-room over the tale she had just been told, that she could change places for twenty-four hours with either the pupil or the governess, who had brought this present coil upon her. But those kind of transformations unfortunately only occur in dreams, and so, rising somewhat wearily from her seat, she went into prayers, and for her own private prayer prayed that she might be helped through the difficulties brought her by the quarrels of these two undisciplined spirits.

Prayers ended, the Principal and her English governess accompanied the two girls who shared Helen Edison’s room upstairs. Miss Crofton determined to make an effort to get the affair settled at once. Perhaps, tired out by her loneliness, darkness, and the lateness of the hour, the stubborn pupil might be more easily won to gain speedy rest and quietness by begging pardon for her impertinence than at another time. At any rate, it was worth the trial.

But, worth or not, it was not made. When the door was softly unlocked by Miss Rowe, out of no regard to the prisoner, but following her lately cherished instincts as a spy, for some moments every one stared blankly at each other, thinking the bird was flown.

The Principal moved the lamp she held, and raised it above her head as she looked round the room, and suddenly its light flashed on to a little white hand lying on a counterpane.

“Why! she is in bed, and—asleep! ” said Clara Boswell, in low tones, as she ran softly across the floor.

“Yes, she is asleep,” repeated Miss Crofton, bending over her refractory pupil with a strangely tender smile, and then, kissing the lovely forehead, she turned away, and bidding the other girls to be kindly quiet in getting to bed, she signed to the English governess to follow her, and left the room.

CHAPTER XIX.

JOSEPHINE HOLDS THE SCALES.

On leaving the sleeping Helen Edison, the Principal of Crofton Hall turned to her young governess, saying, rather sternly, “We must wait until to-morrow, Miss Rowe, to administer any reprimands; and I cannot help hoping that by that time you, as the elder and wiser, will be willing to pave the way for Miss Edison’s apologies, by telling her that you do not mind confessing in your turn that you were rather needlessly hasty and harsh with her.”

“That I shall never do! ” said the English governess in a low, fierce tone, that quite startled her companion, and the two separated without even exchanging good-nights.

And here we must go back a little to explain how matters had come to this present terrible pass.

It must be confessed that the state of feeling between pupil and teacher had been increasingly embittered by Helen’s sympathies for poor Josephine, sympathies which had been still further outraged by a needless display of what looked very much like petty spite on the part of Miss Bowe, but a few days before this last and worst quarrel.

Helen had secured her favourite seat at the evening meal between Josephine Bell and Milly Wilmot, and after studying Josephine’s face for a few moments she said, with a little air of loving triumph, “Now confess the truth, Josephine; don’t you feel ever so much better for having been out of doors this afternoon instead of poring over your books all the while!”

Josephine was eating bread and butter with far more appetite than she had shown for it lately. But at her companion’s question her face grew overcast, and she murmured, “But I haven’t a quarter done my French, and I haven’t looked at any spelling, and just now Miss-”

Josephine suddenly checked herself, and tried to check Milly also, who was proceeding to finish her sentence for her. But Helen’s “Tell me, Mill,” was stronger than Josephine’s, “Please don’t,” and so Milly told how Miss Bowe had stopped Josephine five minutes ago, as they were coming in to tea together, to say that for the future she should be obliged to hear her repeat that lesson with Rose, as she had not time to hear her separately.”

. “She is a regular inquisition wretch,” muttered Helen fiercely. “What a queer expression!” said Milly, laughing. “And was spelling one of the tortures of the Inquisition? ”

“Hurting people’s feelings out of spite was,” retorted Helen.

“I don’t really believe that this time she had anything to do with spite at all,” said Josephine, in a low tone. “It was not spoken as though she were cross, but more as if she were really anxious to save a few minutes. And you remember it has been her own leisure in a sort of way that she has given up to me.”

“Oh, there, do leave off,” interrupted Helen irritably. “It makes me in a worse rage than ever to hear you always making excuses for her, when she has nothing but hardness and disagreeableness for you. And, besides, I can’t help feeling as if you were something of a hypocrite; for you may try to persuade me as much as you like, but I don’t believe a bit the more that any but very old people, or people just going to die, ever manage to fancy they like those who are horrid to them.”

“Fancying it wouldn’t be much use,” murmured Josephine.

“No; of course not. So it is much better to be honest, and let it alone altogether. If people slap me on one cheek there is certainly a second slap to follow; but it’s not on my cheek, and if you would be guided by me, it would not be for you to have the two either.”

“In this matter I have a wiser guide than you,” said Josephine, in a tone of unaccustomed firmness; and then the bell rang as the signal for rising from tea, and Helen hastened away to pass the fifteen minutes’ interval before preparation-time in proving to Milly, and half a dozen other sceptical companions, that her leap over the two back-to-back chairs was not to be an exceptional achievement.

Josephine went off to the little study to learn her spelling, but when she had found the book she held it upside down, and gazed at it with unseeing eyes. She was thinking of her brilliant, talented schoolfellow. Hitherto she had thought of her with unmixed admiration and fondness, with just a faint tinge added of almost irrepressible envy for her talents, courage, and confidence. But as the poor, contemptuously pitied, lustreless pupil sat in the darkening, dull little room alone, with her upside-down spelling-book in her hand, she was not envying her companion, she was not admiring her. She was pitying her. Strange and impossible as Helen would have supposed it, she was being pitied by “poor Josephine.” Beauty, talent, strength, chivalry, high-spirited generosity, were all very fair things in the sight of Josephine, but they were as nothing to her if they were to be weighed in the balance with that most wonderful assurance, “Ye are my friends.” Dead leaves beside pearls. Josephine had the pearls. Not for all the splendour of the world, not for all the genius of men, would Josephine have given up that Friend, the Friend who says to those who love Him, “As my Father hath loved me, so have I loved you.”

CHAPTER XX.

MISS ROWS CHOOSES A CONFIDANTE.

Half an hour later Josephine Bell was sitting, with her hand up to a miserably puzzled head, between Helen Edison and Milly Wilmot in the large class-room, and trying to master her French exercise. Helen and Milly had secretly despatched little Rosie to beg her to leave her solitude and join them.

“Even if the lynx won’t let us help her,” Helen had said, “it will, at any rate, be much better for her not to be so much alone.”

With this assertion Milly had heartily agreed by the quotation, “Them’s my sentiments,” and then Rosie had been despatched on her errand, and returned triumphantly with her sister. But, so far, any benefit Josephine might have reaped from the change was certainly restricted to that which she considered the questionable one of companionship, for “the lynx,” otherwise Miss Rowe, had kept a close watch upon the trio of friends ever since she had been surprised by the entrance of the two sisters.

“Go to Miss Rowe, and make her have the trouble of helping you herself,” whispered Helen once, “as she won’t let us.”

“But I can never understand her explanations ; they are too quick,” sighed Josephine.

Nevertheless she rose and carried her book to the end of the room, only to come back five minutes after, feeling that the difficulties were even more complicated than she had before thought them; and Helen looked at her as she sat with her tired, troubled head on her hand, and as she looked her thoughts gradually faded away from her lessons and passed back to the strange expression of rapt sweetness which she had seen earlier in the day on that plain, weary face. At last she muttered, in a tone inaudible even to Rose Trew, her neighbour on the other side, “Josie, I cannot understand you. If you really meant what you said this afternoon about the happiness of that other learning, how can you bother yourself so dreadfully about this, which, from your point of view, must seem nothing but so much rubbish? ”

For some moments Josephine made no answer.

Then she murmured, “‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ And while I am here it is my- duty to do what my father has placed me here to work at.”

A minute later .she added, “Besides, I don’t think any of God’s gifts rubbish. Some are greater and grander than others, but all are fair and good; and one of the choicest of earthly gifts, I think, is that of learning.”

Unconsciously Josephine pronounced the last words in her natural tone, and a painful flush mounted to her temples- as a mocking laugh from the end of the room accompanied the unlooked-for reply.

“You are no doubt aware, Miss Bell, that there is a fine for speaking in this room during the preparation hours, but you spoke so like a book that I must really let you off. I should never have imagined that you held learning in such high esteem. It is a pity that you do not contrive to appropriate a little more of the gift to yourself.”

“I do try,” was the simple answer. But there was such a ring of sadness in the words, that even Miss Rowe was touched by their patient humility. A tinge of compunction came into her own cheeks, and she bent her head quickly over some needlework. Helen Edison glanced at her curiously, and the thought crept into her mind that Josephine’s learning had given her a power which she, with all her cleverness, did not possess. It was true that she could have made Miss Eowe flame out into furious looks and sinfully angry words, but she could not do as Josephine had done—make her bend her head in penitence.

After a lapse of two or- three minutes Miss Rowe rose, and came round to where the poor over-anxious student sat vainly trying to master her task. Helen scarcely recognised the governess’s voice as she said, quietly, “You have not got on very far, I see. I am afraid you did not understand my explanation much better than that of the book.”

“I am so sorry,” said Josephine earnestly; “I wish I gave you less trouble.”

“I shall not so much mind the trouble in the future, if you really mean you do care to get on,” half muttered the young governess, as though she were ashamed of her own unusual graciousness. In a few moments she added, but rather in excuse for the present than the past, “I thought you looked upon learning as disagreeable, useless drudgery, only to be got through because you could not help yourself.

‘Since you really recognise its value, I shall be far more willing to give you aid. Carry y6ur books over there to the desk, and I will join you in a minute.”

The minute’s interval which Miss Rowe claimed was devoted to snatching up Helen Edison’s exercise-book, and sharply tearing two of its pages across, which Helen had just profusely adorned with climbing monkeys, fighting cats, snakes, worms, and snails.

“It is better to have no talents than to pervert them,” she said in her most dictatorial tone. “Miss Boswell, you will see that Miss Edison pays a fine for a babyish waste of preparation-time.”

“It was no waste at all,” retorted Helen; “I have done all my lessons; and I will ask the Principal if, under those circumstances, it is wrong to practise my drawing. To-morrow I will fill a page with spiteful toads; I shall not have far to search for a model.”

A flash darted from Miss Rowe’s eyes, and she raised her hand. Happily on that occasion she restrained herself in time, and vouchsafing no answer to the impertinent speech she marched off to Josephine, not certainly in such an amiable mood as when she proffered her assistance, but still disposed enough to render it for her promise’ sake, and for yet another reason also. The young governess was sorely in need of a confidante to whom she might pour out the tale of a sudden grief that had fallen upon her, and during the last few minutes she felt that the despised, dimeyed, ignorant pupil was just exactly the sort of confidante that she should choose—humble, gentle-hearted, unobtrusive, easily put aside again.

In any and every possible trouble that could have affected herself alone Miss Rowe would have stood apart, if her heart had broken in so doing. But the trouble that had now fallen upon her, since that morning’s post came in, was not one that she could, in her pride, claim to bear alone; and from its very nature it had a softening influence upon her in some measure, at any rate at first, and her soul cried out for sympathy. She had no Heavenly Father to go to, no Comforter, no all-powerful Friend, and so she turned to Josephine.

The preparation hour came to an end before Josephine’s exercise was finished, and all her companions dispersed, Milly whispering as they went off, “Miss Rowe really is taking pains to make things clear to poor Josephine now.”

“Why couldn’t she do so before? ” growled Helen; but even she half forgave her own torn exercise-book as she glanced at Miss Bell’s relieved expression of countenance, and heard the patient tones in which the English governess was giving explanations about a lesson with which there was no real need that she should concern herself at all.

“Isn’t Miss Rowe kind to-night? ” murmured little Rose, clasping her hands fondly round the arm of her very dear new friend.

“Humph! Not quite such a snarling hyena as usual,” assented Miss Nellie, and then she let herself be pulled off by little Rose to a special favourite bench in a deep recess in the wide hall, and prepared obediently to finish a fairy tale, of a particularly weird description, begun the previous day.

CHAPTER XXL.

HER LITTLE BROTHER.

Meantime the French exercise came to an end, and to a far more satisfactory one than had ever yet been the case with Josephine; and, forgetting the cruel insult of the order given as they were all going in to tea, and the sneering laugh of half an hour since, she raised her eyes with true gratitude to her companion, saying, “ I have never understood a lesson so well before. You have been very good to me. I wish I could do anything for you, you look so tired to-day.”

For some moments there was silence. “You have been very good to me.” Those words struck to the young teacher’s heart with a keenness of reproof she had never felt in her life before. They were uttered most truthfully, but they were most false.

Good indeed! For the past two months she had added to the girl’s sorrowful sense of her own feeble intellect by every cutting taunt or show of contemptuous indifference that had occurred to her, and now she had condescended to aid the girl in her dunce-like difficulties because an unaccustomed sense of loneliness caused a wish for sympathy that she could demand as she chose, and cast off when it bothered her! Was that being good?

And the offer of the sympathy came so readily, and the sympathy itself—“You look so tired to-day.” A sense of shame and unworthiness came over Emily Rowe as she sat there silent. She had added to the girl’s tiredness many times, and in the secrecy of her heart she felt that there was a meanness doubly great in purposing to glean even a crumb of comfort from her. . But Josephine sat there, so still, so patient, so meek, so utterly forgetful of self, only so sorry that one of her fellow-creatures, the least kind of them all so far as she was concerned, should be so tired. And Emily Rowe’s yearning for that crumb of comfort grew too strong to be resisted.

At last she took a letter from her pocket, and saying hastily, and in a low tone, “I am not tired, but I am very miserable,” she put it into her pupil’s hands.

Josephine looked puzzled for a moment; she did not understand; and with a touch of her usual impatience with dulness, Miss Rowe snatched it back, drew the letter from its envelope, and then returned it, saying, “There; you can read, you know.”

“Oh yes, I can read,” said Josephine, in a quick tone of apology; and making no further delay in proving the statement, she opened the sheet and began to peruse the contents, Miss Rowe watching her the while. Five seconds had scarcely passed, however, before sighs burst from the lips of both of them almost simultaneously, and Josephine raised eyes full of tears to her companion.

“Poor, noble little fellow!” said Josephine, instinctively stretching out one of her hands and laying it on that of the governess.

For an answer Miss Rowe uttered a second contented sigh as she murmured, as though to herself, “I thought I was right. I thought you would know just what to say in this sort of thing.” And then Josephine finished the letter, and the two sat there together silent for some time.

“Shall you not go home to help nurse him? ” asked Josephine at length softly.

“How can I? ” was the sharp-toned question. Then, recollecting herself—“I can’t. We are poor—poor as church mice, if you know what that means. There will be little enough but dry’ bread for my mother as it is now, Harry will need so many extra luxuries. And unless he is to have the parish doctor, I must earn my quarter’s salary to pay one for him.”

“I—I have—plenty of——” began Josephine, timidly, earnestly. And then she stopped, and pretended to be busy once more with the letter, while heavy tears dropped on to it.

“Hush, hush, don’t cry; you must not for my trouble,” said Miss Rowe hurriedly. “I ought not to have worried you with it. Only it is some comfort to feel there is some one feeling a little sorry for one’s grief.”

“If only I could help you,” said Josephine. “If only you would let me. My money is no good to me; could you not let it be some good to—to—to—your little brother? You see, your mother says he moans for you even in his sleep.” The young governess caught back a sob and stifled it, and then muttered, hardly, “And so he will have to moan, if he means to moan for me, till Easter comes.”

“That is nearly three weeks.”

“Yes. And if it was nearly three years it would have to be the same. And you know us well as I do that I cannot take your money.

But I am glad to have you know about poor little Harry. You had better go now. Don’t talk of this to any one else.”

“No,” murmured Josephine absently, as she rose. And then, with her usual awkward, shuffling movements, she left the room. Miss Bowe looked after her till she had disappeared, and then her eyes fell back upon the letter with a hard expression in them as she muttered,

“If the pain and weakness had fallen upon me, one might have seen some justice in it—at least, no doubt mother would have done so; but upon poor little Harry, where can be the love and mercy that afflicts him so heavily, I should like to know? And as a reward, too, for his noble, brave, self-forgetfulness!”

At this last thought her cheeks glowed with pride as well as love for her little ten-year-old brother, who by a deed of true heroism had brought himself to the verge of brain fever, and so she dismissed all dwelling upon Josephine Bell’s last words; otherwise her thoughts might have led her to remember that matters would have been decidedly worse if they had been arranged according to her ideas of mercy, and she, the main breadwinner of the family, had been laid upon a helpless and expensive bed of sickness.

Josephine went up to her own room, and with simple words and childish phrases, but a most earnest heart, prayed to the One great, omnipotent, all-knowing Father, that He would watch by the fever-bed of little stricken Harry Rowe, strengthen the loving mother who wrote in a tone of such sad but patient faith, and comfort “poor Miss Rowe.”

Yes, it was poor Josephine’s turn now to apply the epithet “poor” to some one; but there was no touch of contempt in her breathing of the word. Nor was there any thought of triumph that the highly accomplished, imperious teacher should have been brought to seek comfort from her—the heartily despised pupil. She did certainly wonder for a little while how she came to be the chosen confidante, but her humility led her to a tolerably fair solution of that mystery.

“She knew I am not clever enough to tease her with a lot of talking,” she murmured as she rose from her knees. “And it is bad to have to listen to that, even from the best and kindest people, just at the beginning of a trouble, when it seems almost easier to think it is as bad a3 ever it can be, than to be made to see and confess that there is a bright side to it.”

CHAPTER XXII.

FREE TRADE IN SWEETMEATS.

“And so, you see, not any way can I get a letter from India on my birthday,” and with this piece of information little Rose heaved a prodigious sigh, and gazed with her big blue eyes out of the hall window, as if she had some half hope that one of Helen Edison’s fairy birds might fly through it, and give her a welcome contradiction.

But instead of a fairy bird flying in at the window, her sister Josephine came to her down the stairs, and, stooping over her, kissed her fondly. The child returned the caress with interest, saying, “0 Josiel Helen has been telling me such a most loveliest of a lovely fairy tale! I wish you had heard it.”

“So do I,” said Josephine. “It seems to me that Helen is always showing us kindness of some sort.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Helen merrily. “Rosie is the most delicious excuse to me for being idle ever so often. I owe her a bushelful of gratitude for happening to be here now. But where have you been all this time? ”

“Writing my French exercise with Miss Rowe.”

“What! all this long while? How-”

“No; not all this while,” hastily interrupted Josephine. “We have been having a chat.”

“Oh! Then I hope Miss Rowe has been begging your pardon for all her impertinence to you of late—horrid old thing! ” was the answer, as Helen drew her head back to escape the hand which Josephine tried to lay over her lips.

“Helen, Helen,” she remonstrated, in grieved tones, “you should not say such things—indeed you should not. You are beginning to gain great influence in the school, and you do not know how much harm you may do. And you have such a wonderful power for doing good”

“Glad to hear it,” was the offhand retort. “I hope I shall be able to make laudable use of the said power in making the vixen’s life a burden to her.”

“Miss Rowe is in great trouble just now,” said Josephine, in a low, pleading tone.

But Helen was in no mood just then to be touched by anything into pity or penitence.

“Glad to hear it,” she said again. “Hope it will do her good. She’s made me waste six-pennyworth of stamps resticking those lovely drawings of mine together. Look there.”

Helen lifted from the seat beside her the two pages Miss Rowe had torn up, now neatly joined together again by little strips of stamps.

“If you were determined upon such a useless piece of work, why did you not use your gum and a sheet of paper, instead of wasting all these stamps?” asked Josephine, as much in wonder as reproach.

“Couldn’t get the cork out of the bottle.” “You didn’t try very long,” half-whispered Rosie slyly.

“No, certainly not very long,” assented Helen calmly. “The cork stuck, though, and I had these handy. Besides it’s not waste, you know. I’ve made a sort of gift to the Government, and my side is in just now. Mamma’s for the others, but papa and I are Liberals.”

“Are what?” cried Milly Wilmot, coming up to the group at this moment and catching the last words. “Whatever rubbish are you talking now? And as for liberal, indeed, I know somebody who bought a whole shillingsworth of sweets yesterday, and hasn’t given me a mite; I don’t call that very liberal.”

“I don’t know. It might be Liberal-Conservative,” was the retort, with a laughing gleam in the bright eyes. “But at present Miss Crofton is the Conservative. She met Jem yesterday, and made spoil of my treasures for my good. Suppose we four get up a bread riot, and claim them back. I’ll head the mob.”

“I’ll follow you,” cried Milly, laughing.

“And I won’t,” said Josephine, smiling, but very decidedly holding back.

Little Rose looked with doubtful entreaty at her sister. “Yes, dear, you may go with them if you like,” said Josephine.

Even Helen’s audacity failed her for a moment or two when she reached Miss Crofton’s door, and she stood with hands hanging down, hesitating whether to rap or retreat.

“Be quick! ” said Milly.

“All right,” was the. answer, and the next instant the quick decided tap had been given that had of late become so familiar to the Principal’s ears.

“Come in,” was called from within the room. But again Helen hesitated, and Miss Crofton, who happened to be standing near the door, stepped forward and opened it herself.

“Why, my dears, what is it? ” she asked in surprise, gazing at her three rosy-faced pupils. “What have you come about? Is anything the matter? ”

“N—no. Nothing is the matter, Madam,” began Helen, the curving lips beginning obstinately to curl up into a suspicion of a smile. “The thing is, we have—have been thinking about politics and free trade, and—those sorts of things. And—we think free trade is—nicest. Don’t you? ”

And then Miss Nellie lifted her long lashes and raised her great eyes to those of the schoolmistress, which were filled with a look of most utter bewilderment. She put her arm round Rosa Bell and drew her to her as she asked, “Can you tell me, little one, what this very funny companion of yours has come about? ”

“I think,” whispered Rosie, “I think about her sweets.”

“About her-” repeated Miss Crofton doubtfully. And then, as memory flashed its light into her mind, her lips too curved into a smile, which speedily gave way to a hearty laugh.

“You impudent child! How dare you come to me like this? ” she asked, turning to Helen.

“Because you are so kind. I like having things to come to you about. I dare do anything for that, but—vex you.”

The schoolmistress bent and kissed her sweetvoiced young pupil.

“But you do approve of free trade, don’t you? ” was the question again the next moment, and, whether Miss Crofton did or not, the three schoolfellows very shortly after marched off in triumph with the packets of lemon-drops and hard bake.

“There will be at least a dozen of us, dear Madam, to share it amongst,” said Helen, reassuringly; “and I promise never to buy any more here without asking you first.”

“And do not ask me too often,” said Miss Crofton, with an implied admission of weakness which made her pupil look up at her with laughing triumph in her eyes.

When Rosa Bell had run off to bed, carrying with her a Benjamin’s portion of the sweetmeats, Helen again sought out Josephine and had a long chat with her about the little girl’s approaching birthday, to which she was not looking forward with any especial hopefulness. All the child’s birthdays hitherto had been spent with most loving parents, who had taken pains to make each anniversary a joyous and memorable festival; and the poor little girl had found it a hard matter to keep back her sobs, as she told her sympathising schoolfellow that she had to forego even the hope of getting letters from her father and mother on this coming birthday, which, for the first time, was to be spent at school.

“At any rate something shall be done for poor wee Rosie,” said Helen resolutely, and feeling strongly indignant with the Indian mails and circumstances generally. But even as she spoke various plans occurred to her by which Rose’s doleful anticipations should be pleasantly disappointed.

The following afternoon the two sisters unexpectedly started off on a few days’ visit to some acquaintances just arrived from Calcutta, and settled for some weeks about fifty miles from Crofton House, after which they talked of going to the North of Scotland for eight months, when they were to return to the neighbourhood of the Bells in India. This was the only opportunity the Jansons would have of carrying back personal intelligence to their neighbours of their daughters’ welfare, and they kindly availed themselves of it, according to their promise.

“I wish I were you,” sighed Miss Rowe enviously, when Josephine sought her to tell of the invitation Miss Crofton had just delivered. “I don’t suppose you much care to go to Saffron-Walden; but for me, I would give my all to go there at the present time for a few days.”

Josephine looked at her inquiringly and with sudden interest. “Is it near your home, then? ” “My home is in it. Poor little Harry is lying tossing in his bed a very little distance from the fine old church. But there, you had better go and pack up now. You have not too much time. Can I help you? ”

“Oh no, thank you, there is very little to do,” said Josephine gratefully, as she went away to her own room, thinking how much she wished that she could teach Helen one or two simple lessons, but harder to learn, perhaps, than she quite understood. At any rate, Helen Edison did not learn them then; nor had she when she lay sleeping with Miss Rowe’s wrathful face bent over her, beside the Principal’s, the night before Rosa Bell’s birthday; to which date we now once more return.

CHAPTER XXIII.

WAR AND PEACE.

Four clear strokes rang out from the church dock on the hill It was a dark night, although the stars were doing their best to brighten the aspect of affairs out of doors; but they were of little service in lighting up the rooms of Crofton House, and so thought Helen Edison as she stood trying to peer into one of the drawers of her chest, which she had just softly opened.

The night was very dark and the house was very still, and probably every one in it was asleep but Helen. However, considering how early she had betaken herself to bed, it was little wonder that she awoke proportionably early. Besides, she had made up her mind to awake early, and, strange as it always seems to me that it should be so, it is, nevertheless, a fact that making up one’s mind overnight is more efficacious than any number of alarm-bells, or promises from other people.

Helen was bent upon making little Rosie’s birthday a happy one for her, and she depended, in a large measure, for doing this upon the presents she had provided. But no one could tell, as Helen informed herself, now that she was in disgrace, how matters might go when the morning came, and whether Miss Rowe might not manage to prevent the pleasant giving of the gifts at all if she had the power.

“But she shan’t,” muttered Nellie resolutely; and so at four o’clock on that 31st of March she stood peering into the drawer that held the treasures, trying to see how to lift the doll without tumbling its delicate garments. Then she had to lay it and the remainder of its wardrobe, together with several other small articles, in a shawl, that she might be able to carry all at once, for she dare not risk two journeys past the English governess’s room. Once during her arrangements Clara Boswell’s regular breathing stopped, and she murmured, “Who’s there? ”

But she was speaking almost in her sleep, and was soon quiet again, and Helen quickly and lightly left the room, and flew like a slim shadowy ghost to the second door down the corridor. Here she had to pause again and deposit her long burden on the floor while she turned the handle. Very cautiously she pushed the door open and looked in. It was half-past four now; Josephine’s blinds were all up, and a faint twilight was peering into the darkness. The occupants of the two little beds were very sound asleep.

Helen unceremoniously deposited two sets of neatly folded clothes, which she found on two chairs, on the floor, and then, placing the two chairs seat to seat beside Rose’s bed, she proceeded to drape them with her shawl and arrange her gifts upon them—the doll in the centre, at its head a couple of boxes of bonbons, at its feet a box of minute gold-edged notepaper and envelopes, surrounded by the most brilliant of crackers, and the remainder of the doll’s clothes hung over the back. While the soft little white hands made these arrangements there was a soft, sweet smile on the lovely young face. It looked so loving and innocent and gentle that most people would have found it difficult to believe that but a few short hours before it had been flung back with burning cheeks and blazing eyes, while passionate words poured from those rosy lips. Now the rosy lips were waiting most eagerly to utter the most affectionate good wishes.

Everything disposed according to her taste, Helen seated herself on the end of the child’s bed and patiently waited for the clock to strike five. “It could not hurt her for once in her life to be awakened at that hour,” Helen had decided, seeing she went to bed so early.

The minutes seemed very long. Several times Helen thought that the hour must have sounded without her hearing it. But at last patience was rewarded. The first stroke was wafted from the hill. Helen counted the five, and then, bending forward quickly, she bestowed three very firm kisses upon her little schoolfellow’s mouth, whispering between each, “It’s only I, Rosie darling.”

“Who’s I? ” gasped the bewildered, drowsy child, after the last smothering kiss and accompanying assurance.

“Why, Helen, of course,” was the answer, with a little ghost of a laugh. “But hush, you must not wake anybody, or I shall get into a fuss again, you know, for being here. I’ve only come to wish you a whole bushelful of many happy returns of the day, and to bring you these things. Look at them.”

Rose was awake now, and she started up and turned towards the chairs. Her companion was only just in time to clap her hand over her mouth to prevent such a shout escaping as must have aroused not only Josephine but most other people in the house, or, at any rate, on that side of it. Ten minutes later Helen got into her own bed again with a contented mind.

CHAPTER XXIV.

ONLY IN TIME TO BE TOO LATE.

Seven o’clock struck, the “getting-up ” time for the pupils from the1st of November to the end of March. There was a rap at the door, and a simultaneous cry from three voices of “Come in.” The servant entered with the cans of hot water, and having deposited them she stepped to Helen’s bed and presented her with a note, with the words, “From Madam, Miss.”

Helen tore it open with her usual impetuosity, glanced over it, and bounded out of bed. Clapping her hands above her head and singing, “Too late, hurrah, too late!” she danced about the room till Milly declared she believed the yesterday’s starvation bad driven her crazy.

At last Clara Boswell caught hold of her and held her fast while she asked, “What has happened now, you wild Indian of a girl? What is too late?”

“Look and see,” said Helen, laughing, as she held the note before her schoolfellow’s eyes. “ Read that.”

And Clara did-read it, and was more puzzled than before, as well she might be. The note was as follows, very short and stiff:—

“My dear Miss Edison,—Under present circumstances, I feel compelled to forbid you the pleasure of giving any birthday presents to Rose Bell with your own hands. Whether I can allow her to receive them from you at all must depend upon your conduct this morning.

“Yours is much grief, and anxiety for your future, Sybilla Crofton.”

“Well!” ejaculated Clara Boswell in astonished interrogation, when she had read these words through for the third time in the vain endeavour to find any key in them for her companion’s wild glee; “well, I do not see anything very cheering or delightful in this. Dear Miss Crofton greatly troubled-”

“Yes,” interjected Helen, her face clouding for a moment. “That’s bad, certainly. I’m horribly sorry for that, of course. But go on; what were you going to say next? ”

“Why, next, your own kind hopes and works of the past three or four days are disappointed-”

“Are they, though? ” murmured Helen, beginning to smile again. Clara stared, and so did Milly Wilmot. But Clara continued, “And then—worst of all, in one sense—perhaps poor little Rose will get none of those gifts after all,

which would have so brightened up—”

But at this point, for the third time, Helen interrupted her. Bursting into a peal of the most triumphant laughter and breaking away from her captor, she shouted, “Ah! but perhaps, and for certain, your perhaps goes for nothing, my lady fair. She’s got them, Clara, she’s got them! Every one of them! Oh, how delicious that I thought of that plan, and that I woke up in time to carry it out I Rose has got the doll, and the bonbons, and the note-paper, and everything, and I gave them to her my very own self at five o’clock this morning, and got, oh! such a heap of kisses and dear little dimples in return, that I feel set up against all the horrid old Rowes in-”

“Take that, you impertinent girl! ” cried a voice choking with passion, as the sound of a heavy box on the ears fell through the room, followed for an instant by a dead silence.

While Helen was explaining everything the door opened, unperceived by any of the three preoccupied inmates. Mademoiselle had told Miss Rowe over-night, with tears in her eyes, of the prohibitory note Miss Crofton had decided to write Helen to stop her giving the presents before she had spoken with her, and so far from sharing the kind-hearted little Frenchwoman’s sympathetic sorrow, she had slept with greatly soothed feelings from the intelligence. Then she heard laughter and merry voices in the adjoining room directly after they were called in the morning, and her floor shook from the vibration of the next one.

How dared they be joyous in there with the culprit! She stopped midway in her toilette, slipped on her dressing-gown, and quietly entered the next room in time to hear that her hopes for her hated pupil’s disappointment were baffled. Then came the impertinent allusion to herself, and then—that blow.

The silence that followed, almost instantaneous as it was, was terrible; then Helen started round with a fierce look in her eyes and uplifted hand. As suddenly as it was raised it fell again.

“No,” she said, “I don’t fight, I don’t use my fists like a navvy or a fishwoman. I am a lady.”

The look in the eyes now, and the tones of the low, constrained voice, expressed such measureless scorn that the antagonist shrank before that set, white young face. There was a pause, and Helen added, “I should think you had better go now, unless you carry your malice so far as to wish to kill me with cold.”

Almost mechanically Miss Rowe went towards the door, and as she passed through the same resolutely constrained young voice followed her with the words, “Remember, you will have to beg my pardon for that blow.”

Passing her own room the young governess went on to that of the Bells with a half-defined purpose of claiming back the toys from poor little Rose, and telling her that Miss Crofton did not choose to let her have them. She rapped hastily at the door, and before she could turn the handle the child herself opened it, the beautiful doll in her arms, her rosebud of a face full of dimples.

“0 Miss Rowe!” she cried, joyously, “do come and see all my delicious, delightful things! And I have got something for dear, dear, dear little Harry, too! Do look, please.”

“Another time, child, another time,” was the hurried answer. “Many happy returns of the day to you. I must go now; I am not dressed, you see, and the prayer-bell will ring in a few minutes.”

And Miss Rowe turned abruptly and went back to her own room, a second time discomfited.

Rose pushed her sister gently down on to her bed, climbed on to her lap, and, cheek to cheek, murmured, happily, “Josie, my prayers will have to be all praises to-day, I think.”

“I often feel like that, sissy darling,” whispered back the other, and especially when I thank our Father for giving me such a very precious, dear little blessing as you are.”

“Mamma called me her little blessing,” whispered back the child, “when she said that last good-bye on board the ship. 0 Josephine! I wish the years would soon pass, that we might be all together again! ”

“Yes, darling. Won’t it be a happy part of being in heaven, that there we shall be together, never, never again to part? ”

“Yes, Pheenie, yes; I often think of that beautiful thing. But, Pheenie, should I want to go there just yet? ”

“No, sissy darling; no, of course not until you are called there,” was the answer, as the elder sister strained the blooming child in her arms. But a scarcely audible sigh followed the answer, that seemed to have a faint echo of a tired longing in it, and the words floated through the slow brain, “Having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ.”

CHAPTER XXV.

A SURPRISE.

“Helen, could you spare a short time to come with me to the little study? ” It was Josephine who spoke, just as they were leaving the dining-hall after tea on little Rose’s birthday.

There were no smiles on Helen Edison’s face now, and she hesitated slightly as she answered, “ I meant to give what little time I have to spare to-night to telling Rosie a story.”

“Ah I please let me tell you one instead,” said Josephine, very anxiously. “Rose shall come with us, and get her doll ready for bed. Besides, I think she will like to hear the story I have to tell you to-night even better for once than a fairy tale.”

Helen allowed herself to be drawn on till they were apart from all the other girls, and then once more she stood still, and facing her schoolfellow with something of a sullen expression on her face, she said doggedly, “Look here, Josephine, I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, or to vex you in any way, but I had better tell you at once that it will be no good your trying to scold me now, or attempting to read me a lecture, for I am in no humour for it, and won’t listen.”

“I know,” said Josephine, with a mingling in her voice of sadness and gentleness. “I am not thinking of preaching, or of scolding you. I only want to tell you something about a poor little boy Rose and I saw while we were away last week. I should like to interest you in his case.” “Oh ! certainly I’ll listen to anything of that sort you like to tell me. That’s quite another matter. Is the little boy’s case anything that papa can help in, do you suppose? ”

“I don’t know; I am afraid not. But you will be better able to judge when I have told you his short history.”

And so saying Josephine Bell ushered her two companions into the little study specially appropriated to her own use after the morning classes were over, day by day.

Beside the fireplace was a tiny horse-hair sofa, and on this Josephine and Helen seated themselves; little Rose established herself on Helen’s lap with a very earnest face, and the narrative began. Before repeating it I must pause to remark that the present state of affairs at Crofton House was very dreary.

There had been a terrible scene that morning. After prayers, which had been an unhappy mockery for two of the party, Miss Crofton had detained every one but the servants, and then gone over the facts, so far as she knew them, of yesterday’s disturbance. Having done so without interruption from any one, she had concluded .earnestly—

** But I hope that the next five minutes will see the end of this cloud, and that we shall have clear skies once more. There is not one here that cannot understand that without patience on both sides, and submission to authority on the part of the pupils, no establishment of this kind can be well regulated. You, I am sure, Miss Edison, will by now have seen this, and will be willing to acknowledge it. To make your apologies to Miss Rowe the easier, in consideration of your yesterday’s punishment, I may add that in some sort they will be also made to me, seeing that during my absence from home Miss Rowe is, as you are aware, my representative.”

. Helen started to her feet with crimson cheeks, and exclaimed, “Don’t say so, Madam! Don’t claim a spy for your representative!—you, who are so frank and straightforward that we all, down to little Rose, learn to respect you as much as we love you! Do you think that you could have ever made yourself tell a little child to sneak softly into a room that she might find out what her companion was about? No, you know that you could not.”

That was the first the Principal had heard of the order to little Rosa Bell. And then she heard also of that box on the ears. And Helen had ended up with, “When Miss Rowe has begged my pardon for that insult, I will beg hers for some portion of what I said, but I cannot do so before.”

After that no one knew exactly what had happened. There was a confused memory of Miss Crofton, in a tone of shocked astonishment, asking her young subordinate if she admitted the accusation. There was an indistinct recollection of a sharp, fierce answer from Miss Rowe that she had a good mind to repeat the blow there and then, not. once but several times, and then all remembered the sudden lull that had fallen on the storm for a few moments, to be followed by the young governess suddenly comIng forward and saying, in cold, slow tones, “After this, Madam, it may be as well that I should let you know that my services are greatly required at home. I will leave to-night.”

“Well,” said Miss Crofton, heavily, “perhaps it will be well.”

, And then, without a glance at Helen Edison, she had gone, and the girls had all trooped off to the breakfast that had been awaiting them nearly half an hour. Mademoiselle had to take the head of the table, for the English governess had gone up to her own room, locked herself in, and refused to come down. She remained there all day, seeing no one. Once, in reply to a third visit from Josephine, she had pushed a tiny note out to her under the door; but that was all the notice she would vouchsafe to any one, of her existence.

There had been some half promise given by the Principal two or three days ago that if Rosie’s birthday should be fine, a holiday expedition should be made somewhere.

The day did turn out a most lovely foretaste of summer, but there were too many thunderclouds in the school atmosphere to permit of any talk of festivities. The day dragged on with its usual succession of classes, Miss Crofton taking those belonging to the English governess, but paying no attention to Helen, who began as the hours wore away to feel an inclination to follow her antagonist’s example. Through her Miss Rowe was losing her position; through her Miss Crofton was put to terrible inconvenience. Helen began to feel very miserable, but very hard; and then Josephine got hold of her, and persuaded her to listen to her story about a little boy.

CHAPTER XXVI.

JOSEPHINE’S TALE.

When the three were all comfortably seated,. Josephine waited a minute, staring gravely into the fire.

“Can you see your little hero in the coals; Josie?” asked Helen at last.

“N-o-o,” murmured Josephine, slowly, in deep thought. Then, more quickly, “But how do you know that he is a hero? ”

“How do I know? ” repeated Helen, half laughing. “Why, you said that you were about to tell me the story of a little boy; so I suppose the little boy is the hero of your story, is be not?”

“O-h-h, yes, I see; but he is a hero too,; Helen—a very wonderful hero. If he were a man, and had done this thing, he would be thought a hero; but he is only a little boy of ten years old, and so it is quite glorious. About-six weeks ago he was standing at a railway crossing, waiting for a train to pass. All of a sudden, just as the train was in sight, a baby escaped from its mother and ran right between the lines. The mother stood still, shrieking; so did the other two or three people by her. It was only little Harry who kept his presence of mind and noble self-forgetfulness. While the guard blew his whistle, shouted frantically, and tried to stop the train, Harry flew to the baby, threw his arm round it, and brought it and himself flat on the ground just as the train passed over them.

“When the train was brought to a standstill at last, just beyond them, the baby was picked up unhurt, but a loose hanging chain had broken Harry’s leg, and the shock and strong excitement have made this accident more serious.”

Josephine paused again. Helen’s eyes were glowing, as they always did when she heard of any action that she thought noble. She drew a deep breath, and asked in low tones, “And do you know this noble little fellow?”

“Yes,” was Josephine’s answer. “Just lately I happen to know something of him and his family. Young as he is he has seen a great deal of sadness. Up to two years ago he was the youngest in as happy a home as I should imagine could have been found anywhere. There were four children, a father and mother; they had several servants, horses, carriages, and heaps of hothouses and all sorts of luxuries. Then a bank broke, the fortune was all lost, and in a few weeks the father and younger sister were dead, and the elder brother taken from Eton to be a clerk in a merchant’s office.

“Through all these bitter trials the elder sister had behaved most bravely and beautifully, comforting her mother, striving to comfort her father and sister and cheer them back to life, soothing their deathbeds with firm assurances that she would with her labour support those they left behind, strengthening her brother to face boldly his great reverses, and so tenderly loving and cherishing the little Harry that his previous affection for her grew into the strongest love I have ever seen a child have for any one. 0 Helen! it is so sad to hear the poor little fellow, even in the unconsciousness of fever, sobbing for her to come to him 1 ”

“Then why doesn’t she go to him? ” demanded Helen, with tearful indignation. “How can she let him even have to ask for her? ” “Because,” answered Josephine, in a low voice, “because, Nellie, she has to earn the.food and medicine for Lieu, and the doctor’s fees, although her heart is almost breaking to be with him. People might be gentle with her now, poor thing! I think, under her present circumstances, I could bear anything from her myself.”

“I should think so,” grunted Helen huskily. “So could any one.”

Josephine turned to her with a strange, keen glance, and went on with her history. “The bravo, kind elder sister was engaged to be married when the bank broke. She thought her lover was such a fine, noble sort of fellow, and she was so proud of him. • A few days after her father’s death he came to her, and—her mother told me all this—freed her from her engagement.

“He had seemed very much in love with her while she was rich; he didn’t want her now she was poor. And she said good-bye to him quite quietly, and never got ill, or anything. But from that day her mother says she grew hard and bitter to all the world but little Harry, and her very face changed. She had lost trust in every one.”

“I should think so,” growled Helen a second time. “I wonder where that man is. I should like to tie his head under a pump.”

Again Josephine looked at her curiously, and went on—

“There is little more to tell you of my pitiful tale, except the most pitiful ending. Of course it became necessary for the elder sister, who had been hitherto accustomed to be surrounded with luxury and deference, to work for the support of her mother and brother, and she went out as a governess.

“At first she found it hard to get profitable positions, because people distrusted the power of the elegantly-brought-up young lady to submit herself to the duties of her changed position. But she loved her mother and little Harry too. much not to strive for success; and though the accumulation of troubles had warped her nature, poor thing! to harshness and bitterness and impatience, she worked so steadily, so conscientiously, and successfully with her pupils, that at last, when a first-rate position, coveted by many, was open, she succeeded in obtaining it, and rejoiced in the prospect of being able to pay for her young brother’s education.

“Unhappily, in her new position she met not only with the hundred and one usual trials sure to be felt so keenly by one with her over-tired spirit, but amongst her pupils was a girl who had never learnt to think that she ought to be patient with other people—even sometimes to submit, for love’s sake, to harshness, irritability, or injustice. Very often the girl expected others to be patient with her in her many little freaks and whims, but when the demand came from the other side she ridiculed the idea of meeting it; and the poor young governess’s strained, racked spirit was perpetually tried and tortured further by her, until at last it could bear no more, and the climax came.

“The girl triumphed, Nellie ”—Josephine’s voice was almost a whisper now—“but it seems to me to be a poor, wretched triumph——one to weep over. And by the nine o’clock train tonight Miss Rowe starts for home, to carry with her to the poor mother, who has been so long watching day and night by her child’s bedside, the news that she has lost her position with something of disgrace. It may be long before she can get another; and she had a letter this morning from the doctor, mentioning all the expensive kinds of nourishment which little Harry must have perpetually day and night for the next three or four weeks, unless he is to be left to die. 0 Helen! forgive my saying it, but I would not change places with you to-night, not to have all your cleverness ten times increased! ”

“Why did you not tell me all this before?” murmured a low voice.

“Because she would not let me,” was the sad answer. “You were always so cold and contemptuous with her. You wounded her cruelly; she thought you treated her so because you despised her for being a governess.”

“How could she think me so mean?”

“When people’s hearts are sore I expect they very often think the worst things.”

And then, without another word, Helen rose and left the room.

CHAPTER XXVII.

SHE DOES GET IN!

Three sharp raps at a door, but never an answer. Then a voice calling through the keyhole, “Let me in! You must let me in! I want to beg your pardon.”

Still no answer. It struck seven. Helen felt desperate. She would be summoned to preparation directly. She gave another thump.

“I will break the door down if you don’t let me in.”

“You had better try,” came the cold, taunting answer.

Then Helen got up from her knees, and stood for a few minutes deep in thought, the first result of which was a rapid descent to the class-room, and a hasty request to the presiding governess.

“Please, Mademoiselle, excuse me from preparation this evening. Pray do. I cannot attend to it indeed.”

Mademoiselle looked up at the trembling girl, looked at the pale cheeks and heavy eyelids, and said with heartfelt pity, “Mais oui done, chbre petite, assurement. Vous devez vous mettre au lit.”

“Thank you,” said Helen; not for the recommendation, but for the permission, and she quitted the room as hastily as she had entered it. But instead of going upstairs she flew into the west corridor and down it as fast as her feet would carry her, with a swift look behind her to see that she was not observed.

That west corridor ended in a large window that Miss Nellie had observed the housemaid always left for the last, in her nightly lockings-up and fastenings. And Helen was particularly anxious to get out into the garden at that forbidden hour. The proper garden entrance led out into a continuation of the balcony belonging to Miss Crofton’s library, so exit there was, of course, barred. Nevertheless, the west corridor window was almost as easy a way out for the agile young gymnast, and on this occasion, most happily for several people, fortune favoured her.

Owing to the balmy day the window had been left open to the last minute; and so, before the housemaid’s last minute arrived,

Helen Edison bad vaulted through it into the garden. Creeping along under the wall, she soon turned the corner of the house, reached the apple-tree, climbed into it, as she had done on a certain night some weeks before, and looked in at one of the windows of the deserted dining-hall. A transient gleam of her own impudent fun glanced over her anxious face as she muttered, “I do wish servants would be more careful about shutting room-doors. If any one should be crossing the corridor now how tiresome it would be for me.”

But no one was crossing the corridor, and once more Helen caught at the waterspouts and the ivy, drew herself to the wall, crept along it like a sort of moving spirit, mounted a little higher, crept on again, and-suddenly the two antagonists were face to face.

White face to white face, close together. Not even the glass between. Two pairs of startled eyes gazing into each other’s very depths.

Helen might have expected to find Miss Rowe at her window. It was nothing very surprising that she should be at it. But somehow the circumstance was one utterly unlooked for now. Very often in special states of mental excitement we picture future events to ourselves under certain aspects so vividly that we bring our minds to believe that thus, and thus only, is it possible for them to appear. When facts prove different we are quite amazed, as though the very facts themselves were telling falsehoods.

Helen had imagined Miss Rowe kneeling’ on the floor of her room busily engaged in packing, her face set with stern determination, which she herself would have time to note while leaning for rest on the window-sill before tapping on the panes to attract attention. This sudden meeting with the white, despairing face, was wholly outside the young climber’s calculations.: “Help me in! ” she murmured at last, hurriedly, “I—I am faint I ”

She had climbed up there with the full intention of demanding admittance from that perilous position. Whether even so she would have obtained it, it is impossible to say had matters been as she expected. But now, in this moment, she suddenly forgot Tier expectations and her intentions; only an instinct of self-preservation extorted that hurried plea.

“Help me in!” And even as she uttered it the little white hands began to waver in their hold upon the window-sill.

“Rouse yourself, try to rouse yourself,” was the equally hurried answer, “just for one minute more!”. And the young governess’s face flushed with eager solicitude as she stretched her arms out and caught firm hold of those of her refractory .pupil.

“Now—courage,” she said anxiously. “Try to raise yourself. You won’t-” She paused a moment, trying to think of something to stimulate the fainting girl. “You won’t turn coward now.? ”

There was a strong biting emphasis thrown into .that word coward. But, cruel as it sounded at that moment, it indicated kindness, and had the desired effect of calling back a faint flush into Helen’s cheeks, and assisted her to help herself. In another minute, half pulled and half climbing, she was over the window-sill, and lying weak and trembling on the floor of Miss Rowe’s bedroom.

“Why did you do this?” asked Miss Rowe, as she held her head on her knees and bathed her face with water. She looked at her ever curiously as she repeated, “How could you do such a wild thing? Your obstinate determination to withstand me to the last has nearly cost you dear this time”.

“I did not do this for obstinacy’s sake,” murmured Helen. And then once more she lay silent and still, and Miss Rowe went on bathing her face. After a while Helen spoke again.

“You were going away so soon,

I heard, and you would not let me in, so there was only this way left for me to get at you to tell you about the medal for little Harry, your grand little brother. Papa will get it for him.”

“The medal for Harry! Your father will get it for him! What do you mean? ” asked Miss Rowe, bewildered.

“Why, the gold medal, you know, that people like so much, for being-brave-in saving people, and all that. Perhaps”—and then a little ghost of one of the silvery laughs Issued from Nellie’s pale lips—“perhaps you think you ought to have a medal too for saving me just now. I shouldn’t have been so stupid, only I managed to give my head a great bump—at least, my forehead—just before I saw you, at the corner of your window-sill. I think it’s a big bruise now. May we have a light to see.? ”

“Yes, we had better,” said Miss Rowe, feeling as though she must be in a dream. And she helped Helen to rise, and then, leading her to a chair, she proceeded to light the candle and inspect her pupil’s injuries.

Her first impulse, when she saw the bruised forehead, was to cry out in dismay. It was certainly no slight injury that the sharp double cornice had inflicted. One point had- made a terrible bruise just above the eye, the other had made a cut just above the temple, from which the blood was flowing slowly, the cold water bathing having fortunately checked it in some measure, or Helen by now would have been feeling even weaker than she did.

“I must run to bring Miss Crofton to you,” said Emily Rowe after‘a minute’s renewal of the cold bathing. ““Your forehead must be seen to at once and bandaged.”

“Then you can do it for me.”

“Why, would you trust me? ”

“Oh! yes—now. But do you really feel sorry for me? You look so; but do you really feel as you look? ”

“I might ask you if you really feel glad to •think that my little brother may have the Humane Society’s medal given to him. You look so r but how can I believe that you can be really pleased to think anything pleasant may .happen to any one belonging to me? ”

- “I should like lots of pleasant things to .happen to yourself, let alone to those belonging to you, now I know-” was the answer. And then, with an attempt to smile, she let her head fall against her companion, saying, “I feel so funny. I think I’m—going to sleep—don’t leave me to-night, please.”

She did not go to sleep, but this time she did faint quite away, and Miss Rowe unlocked her door and rang her bell, and soon summoned aid to .her. The servants came, expecting the order to carry the governess’s trunks down to the hall, but they received a request instead to lift Helen on to the bed, and then to go and call their mistress.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MADEMOISELLE BEINGS HOT COFFEE.

“You will not leave to-night now, will you, Miss Rowe?” asked Miss Crofton anxiously, as she finished strapping up Helen’s bleeding forehead and continued her efforts to restore her to full consciousness. Miss Rowe had just gone to the door to answer the tearful inquiries of Josephine and Milly Wilmot, and did not hear the question. As she came back the Principal repeated it.

“You will not leave us to-night, will you? ”

Before Miss Rowe could answer another voice answered feebly, but decidedly, “No, of course she won’t, she is going to stay and take care of me. I shouldn’t wonder if I were to go on like this all night, and if I had to be with Milly Wilmot she’d be going off into a continuous series of squeaks, like minute guns, all the while. Miss Rowe will be nice and quiet, and I find she has the most comfortable hands for a headache I ever felt.”

“And what is Miss Rowe to do for a bed if you lie here? ” asked the Principal, a smile relieving her gravity for the first time since she was hastily summoned to her wilful pupil.

“I forgot that,” was the answer, still with closed eyes and slow moving lips. “But, after all, it’s not much good remembering it, for my head has turned into lead, if there isn’t anything heavier, so it must stop where it is till it gets lighter again.”

And so it did. And Miss Rowe sat up with Miss Nell and most patiently ministered to her throughout those long hours of racking headache. And, truth to say, the two disturbers of the peace of Crofton House got a very large and most undeserved measure of affectionate solicitude from every one.

“Poor Miss Rowe!” and “Poor Helen Edison!” were words in the mouths of all. Of course in real fact they needed pity much less now than they had done during the past few weeks; but the circumstance of bright, blooming Helen lying awake, for nearly the first time in her life, the night through with suffering, and Miss Rowe sitting up the night through to attend upon her, were facts so remarkable that perhaps it is little wonder if they attracted unusual sympathy.

A little before nine o’clock there was a gentle tap at the room door, followed by its opening.

“How nice!” murmured Helen, as she sat with her head leaning against the back of the bed, looking rather ghostlike.

“How nice!” Miss Rowe felt inclined to echo, as the fragrant smell of hot, perfectly made coffee filled the room. She was beginning to feel very much in want of food; but she said nothing; and Helen repeated “How nice! ” and with some pain opened one eye. She closed it again in disgust. “Ah l take away that horrid bread and butter, I can’t eat.”

“Metis done,” said Mademoiselle, in gentle deprecation, “c’est pour la pauvre Mees Rowe, chére petite”

Helen looked puzzled for a moment; and then, in spite of headache and the great blinding bruise, she forced open both eyes and exclaimed, “Oh! what a selfish, horrid thing I am! I thought Josephine was too hard upon me an hour or two ago. I have always thought myself rather grandly the other way; but I see now. Ah, yes, I see now. It has been all I— 1—I with me. My‘ whims and fancies,’ as Josephine said. Of course, I thought the coffee was for me. I always think that everybody must l»e thinking about pleasing me; and if they don’t, I’ve—I’ve hated them.”

And then, in her sudden awakening and feverish excitement, Helen burst into a violent fit of weeping; and Miss Rowe, having whispered to kind, troubled little Mademoiselle to leave them for a while, set herself to soothe her. Provided with the basin of vinegar and water, she set to work once more sponging the burning forehead and hot face, as she said in low, calming tones, “You and I have both been wrong, Helen. But perhaps, after all, in the end we shall have proved to have done each other good rather than harm. Over-indulgence has led you to expect to have your own way in everything; unkindness ”—and the young teacher’s lip quivered for a moment—” unkindness has led me to indulge a spirit of opposition, and to struggle on all occasions for mastery over every one with whom I have of late years come in contact.”

. “If it hadn’t been for Josephine you would have gone away by now, carrying hatred of me with you,” said Helen heavily; “and I should .have gone on hating you as long as I lived.”

Miss Rowe shivered. That picture of unending hatred for each other looked very grim, very hideous, when it was painted in those deliberate plain words; and yet she knew well that it had been very possibly a true -one. And yet they were both Christians; or no, that cannot be said. They were both, like many others .in the world, professing Christians. “See how these Christians love,” was said of old. “See how Christians wrangle,” might be said of those so-called religious people represented by Mis3 Rowe and Helen Edison.

There are many things considered old-fashioned and obsolete now-a-days, but one of the most old-fashioned and obsolete, one is sometimes tempted to believe, is the Baying, spoken nearly nineteen hundred years ago—“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Miss Rowe sat thinking, and after a while she left off bathing the bruised forehead, for its owner was so very still she imagined that she must have fallen asleep. Under this belief she gave free rein to memory. Those other sickbeds by which she had watched so faithfully, more than two years ago, came back to her so vividly. She seemed once more to hear the words of Divine consolation with which she had comforted herself as well as those so dear to her, and then she thought of these blank two years of dreariness that had followed upon her decision to do without that. strength and consolation for the future. She was startled in the midst of her reflections by the quiet, unexpected remark, “How very clever Josephine is! ”

“Yes—she is,” was the equally quiet answer after a moment’s pause.

“How queer every one else here would think it to hear us say so,” said the tired young voice after another slight pause.

“Yes,” was the earnest reply. “They would not understand.” Then soon, “Have you been to sleep? ”

“Oh dear no! I never can sleep in the train. And there are ever so many railway trains in, instead of out of, my head just now. And I find it quite as bothering, only more so. Have you eaten your bread and butter yet? ”

“No. And oh t you have not had the coffee you thought you should like. I am afraid it is cold now. I will have it made hot again.”

“Yes, do,” said Helen; and when it was brought back steaming once more she rewarded Miss Rowe with a mischievous smile as she said, “No, thank you. Not for me. I couldn’t touch it—not if you would promise me the best gallop on the nicest horse in England.”

‘-‘ But I thought you said you should like it,” remonstrated Miss Howe, with a touch of her usual asperity. ’

“Oh no! ” was the calm answer. “I never said anything of the sort; but if I had said I shouldn’t you would, never hare had it boiled up again for yourself, I am sure. I am going to learn to be clever, like Josephine, you see. She is always thinking for other people’s comfort, as if it was just the very .thing she liked doing best of anything in the world. The swing is an instance. You know she is always swinging me and the others, and one day last week I asked her if she never had a swing herself. She said just simply,‘ No, not now.’ I said,‘ Don’t you like it ? ’ She did not answer; but Rosie did for her, exclaiming,‘ Oh! I should think she does then! While we were here last summer during the holidays Josie liked nothing so much as swinging, or sitting in the swing reading. But she won’t swing now because she says every one else likes it so much!* That’s just Josephine in everything.”

“Yes,” said Miss Rowe, in a low tone; “she has been a living lesson in the house.”

No more was said then, for the door opened, and Miss Drofton appeared with a composing draught for the patient, and an injunction that there must be no talking after it, for fear of destroying its effect. Unfortunately, the violence of the headache compelled silence, so neither Helen nor her companion felt disposed for any more conversation for some hours to come. . It was not until’ between three and four. o’clock in the morning that either of them: spoke again. I

Miss Rowe had been kneeling beside: a chair behind the bed for a very, long time, when aft last Helen fancied she caught the sound of low, smothered sobs. She listened more earnestly, and at length said, but more as if she were speaking to herself than to her companion, “Yes, after all, it is not quite comfortable. I expect you Would have been eyer so glad to see little Harry, and of course he would have been awfully glad to see you. Of course you are miserable, and it is still -all my fault.”

“Everything has been as much my fault as yours,” answered Miss Rowe, rising and coming forward. “But do not think that I have been crying now only for sadness. I have been thinking of what you said about the medal-for Harry. It seems impossible that he should really have one; but, oh! you cannot think how happy it would make mamma and me to see our little darling’s bravery so recognised! ”

“I should think so! ” exclaimed Helen. Her headache was getting better now. “I only wish that I had a brother, big or little, to do such a grand thing, and be recognized. But you need not doubt that Harry shall have it. for papa has a lot to do, somehow or other, with the Royal Humane Society; and when he hears what I have to tell him, I am certain that he will say he sees quite clearly where one of the best medals of the year ought to go. I shall go to see Harry in the holidays.”

“I thought you were going to Scotland? ”

“Was I? Oh! then there’il be two things to do; I shall like that. Do you know, my head is ever so much better. I think I shall be able to lie down now and go to sleep. Please go to sleep too.”

And two minutes later she was in a refreshing, dreamless slumber.

CHAPTER XXIX.

WAKING THOUGHTS.

When Helen Edison awoke, about midday, she found Josephine Bell installed in the post of watcher. She raised herself and glanced hastily around the room.

“Where is Miss Rowe? ” she asked quickly. “Surely, Josie, you have not all let her go away while I have been asleep? ”

“She had to go, Nellie, dear,” was the quiet answer. “But perhaps she will come back again soon.”

“Perhaps nonsense!” exclaimed Helen, springing out of bed and beginning to huddle on her clothes with angry impatience, muttering the while, “It’s a disgraceful shame of you all, that’s what it is.”

“What-are you doing?” asked Josephine, coming forward after a few moments’ hesitation. “Miss Crofton left orders with me that you were not to get up, even if you felt able, until she had seen you.”

“I don’t care what orders were left,” was the passionate answer. “A school is not a prison.”

“But won’t you at least tell me why you wish to get up!” asked Josephine gently. “Is it to do your lessons? ”

“Lessons, indeed!” was the sharp retort. “I should think not! I am going to tell Miss Crofton that she must send a telegram to get Miss Rowe to come back. And if Miss Rowe won’t be here with me, I’ll go home.”

“Hush, Nellie, dear,” said her companion gently, “you are making your head ache again. Miss Rowe has not left on your account now! She got a telegram, unhappily, this morning before nine o’clock to summon her home instantly to see her brother, who was suddenly taken worse in the night. In the midst of her trouble and hurry she thought of you. Get into bed again, and I will bring you the little note she. left.”

Josephine might truly call it a little note, for it only consisted of three lines but its importance could not be measured by its size:—“Pray for us in our trouble. But whatever happens, believe that I most earnestly thank God that He has taught us to part friends. I hope to see you again soon.—E. R.”

For some minutes slow heavy tears fell upon these few words. At last Josephine Bell said in a low voice, “I thought that note would be some comfort to you.”

“So it might be,” was the despairing answer, “if I deserved any comfort, 0 Josie! why don’t you all hate me’ instead of being so good to me?. You ought to have beaten me just now, when I got up in a passion, instead of speaking softly to me.”

“And so made you worse? ” asked her schoolfellow, with a slight smile.

Helen looked more doleful than before as she replied sadly, “Yes, you are right; it would have made me worse. But it’s the way I deserve to be treated, for it’s just the way I’ve served Miss Rowe and other people. When they seemed aggravated I have just aggravated them a little more.”

“But you won’t do so again? ”

“How can I say! Last night I thought that I had all of a sudden grown so good that I should never be bad again. And then you see! The first thing that crossed me I was just as abominable as ever.”

“Not quite,” was the half-laughing answer, “You see, this time your wilfulness was for the Sake of some one else. It was really the effect of your penitence about Miss Rowe.”

“Effect of rubbish! It was the effect of my temper,” was the irritable answer. And then Helen laid her head against her schoolfellow’s shoulder with ’a tired sigh and the remark, “And that last amiable little speech was the effect of my headache, Josie dear, so you’ll please let that pass as nothing.”

For Josephine’s part, she would have let a hundred impertinent speeches pass as nothing if they would have brought the colour back into her companion’s cheeks; but the excitement attendant on the past hasty deeds and words bad brought back the pain so intensely that Miss Crofton was equally grieved and shocked when she came in a few minutes later to see the patient.

“I wish I could do something for you, my poor child,” she said pityingly.

“So do I,” was the quick, unexpected answer.

“What is it, then, dear,” asked Miss Crofton, “that you would like me to do? ”

“Only just to make me like Josephine now, directly, please, if you don’t mind,” was the cool, slow answer, out of lips almost white with suffering.

The tears were in the Principal’s eyes as she bent forward to kiss them. “It will take higher power than I have to do that, my child. Not you only, but I and all here, shall indeed have deep cause to thank God if He blesses us with the gift of her meek and Christ-like spirit.”

“Oh, hush, please, hush!” whispered Josephine. I would not have Nellie changed into a likeness of me for anything.”

Possibly Miss Crofton secretly echoed that exclamation as regarded the wholesale metamorphosis, but she certainly prayed most earnestly that her wilful pupil’s present good wishes might ripen into fruit. Bright, winsome, brave, and bonny as she was, there could be little hope for her of even temporal happiness if self were to continue to be ever the foremost in her thoughts.

CHAPTER XXX.

A NEW KIND OF JUMP, AND NO BREAD AND BUTTER.

“So unselfish,” Helen had been called from babyhood upwards by nurses, friends, and acquaintances, and even by her father and mother.

“So unselfish,” Miss Nellie had hitherto thought herself, because she was gifted with an open-handed generosity and teen sympathies. She was slowly, painfully beginning to learn from Josephine what a far more wide and wonderful thing unselfishness is than she had ever imagined, and how utterly impossible of acquirement without the help of One with whom all things are possible.

The three companions had been silent for some time, each engaged with her own thoughts, when Helen murmured, with scarcely moving lips, “I am worrying myself so much about little Harry. I try not, but I cannot help it. Would it be giving you a great deal of trouble to let me send an answer-paid telegram to Miss Rowe to ask how he is this afternoon!”

It need scarcely be said that the petition was granted, although with some fear on Miss Crofton’s part lest the news should be bad, Helen dictated the message herself.

“Please let us know how he is. Don’t trouble yourself to send more than a word.”

Her excitement grew so painfully intense before the answer came that Josephine found even her soothing influence wasted. Indeed, poor Helen could scarcely bear to be spoken to. At last she burst into tears, and said piteously, “0 Josie dear, don’t be vexed, but do please leave off attending to me, and just pray for me, that Miss Rowe’s little brother may live! It seems to be all self again even now, you see, but I cannot help it to-day. My head won’t let me forget myself.”

And after that outburst she said nothing more until Miss Crofton came to her with the open return telegram:—“Slight improvement again. Doctor bids us not despair. Grateful thanks for the inquiry.”

This second improvement in the little boy’s condition was happily permanent, and from that day he began to amend far more rapidly than before the alarming relapse. But the comfort Helen Edison derived from the answer to her telegram was all she was capable of receiving on that score for many days. The blow on her head proved to be of a far more serious character than had been at first supposed, and when she woke up to consciousness at the end of some days she found her mother installed as nurse at her bedside, and little Bose seated, quiet as a little mouse, on a footstool at her mother’s feet, knitting. The pair looked so still, so calm, so grave, that it was quite restful to watch them. But they little knew that there was a pair of wide-open eyes gazing at them while they bent so diligently over their work. They were finely startled at last.

“Let’s have a game with your wool ball, Rosie, before it’s all used,” said a weak, thin little voice, followed by a weak, thin little laugh, which was repeated at sight of the commotion the simple speech had caused. .

The next minute Bose had been gently banished from the room to fly wildly all over the house, even into the kitchens, proclaiming the joyful news that “Helen was well again.”

“What! ” exclaimed Milly Wilmot, between tears and laughter, “well again all with one jump? ”

“Well, getting well,” corrected Rose. “But it’s all the same, for I heard the doctor tell her mamma that once she took a turn she would be all right in no time; and she has taken a turn now, for she wanted to have a game with my ball of knitting-wool; so you see-”

And whatever Milly might think, her little schoolfellow ran off with the decided conviction that she had come off conqueror in that matter. Meanwhile Mrs. Edison held her child clasped closely in her arms, while she murmured fervently, “Thank God for sparing me my child! ” “And thank God, mamma,” whispered Helen, “that He has spared me that I may learn to grow like Josephine.”

“Or, as I suppose Josephine herself would say,” said Mrs. Edison gently, “to grow to be like her Pattern? ”

“Yes, mamma.”

Mrs. Edison let her talk no more then, hut laid her hack on her pillows, gave her some beef-tea, and hade her go to sleep again. She obeyed the injunction so well that morning had faded into afternoon, afternoon into evening, before she once more opened her eyes to look round the room. Her only companion now was Josephine, who was instantly beside her when she found that she was awake.

“Have you slept comfortably, Nellie, dear? ” she asked, as she stroked the little white hand which had grown so very thin during the past fortnight.

For a few moments there was no answer. Then a sigh came, and Josephine asked, more anxiously, “Were you in pain again? ”

“No, not in pain,” was the quiet reply. “I think I must have slept a long time very soundly indeed. But for the past hour or more, as it seems to me, I have been dreaming, and dreaming the same thing over and over again, till it got quite terrible, and I felt I would give anything to be able to say the words aloud, to get rid of the sort of muffled sound of threatening in them.”

“What words were they, then? Anything very dreadful? ”

“They sounded very dreadful to me, partly because they were said so often, and partly because I have thought lately what an impossible command they give:‘ Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect! ’ On and on and on, Josephine, that text has rung through my brain this afternoon while I have been sleeping. It seemed as though some other voice than my own was repeating it, and as though in grim mockery of my weakness and wickedness.”

“Dear Nellie,” said her schoolfellow tenderly, “conscience often does seem like some other person’s voice speaking to one, I think. And it is your own fear, you see, which puts in the mocking tone. But, do you know, I think you are beginning to worry yourself rather in the wrong direction now.”

“Oh, very likely,” sighed Helen, rather bitterly. “Whatever I do is pretty sure to be in the wrong direction. I know that as well as you.”

“But I don’t know it,” said Josephine, half laughing. “Is it likely that you would be chief favourite with us all if you were always doing things in the wrong direction? But, like every one else, you have been doing some things in a wrong direction, and now you seem to think that you are expected in your own strength to go right. You know our Saviour said,‘Without me ye can do nothing.’ What I think we all want is more faith and more love. You will soon find that loving Jesus Christ is the most wonderful help to doing the things that please Him.”

“You love Jesus Christ, Josie? ” said Helen in a low voice.

“Yes, so much!” was the simple, fervent answer; and then the conversation ended, for the door opened, and a mass of golden curls appeared bending cautiously in, and then a pair of earnest blue eyes, and finally, when the blue eyes had discovered that the invalid was wide awake, the rosebud of a face full of an eager air of importance, together with the rest of the dear little maiden, came bravely in, and broke into a quiver of delight.

All the seriousness faded from Helen’s countenance as she looked at the bright little being.

“Come here and be beaten, you little impudence,” she said, laughing. “How dared you run off with that ball this morning? Lift her on to the bed, Josie. There, that’s nice! Now, Miss Impudence, it looked to me this morning very much as if you had been stealing some of my mamma’s love—what do you say to that, pray, little thief?” -

“0 Helen! ” exclaimed the child; “she is so nice, you don’t know! Almost as nice as you and Josephine! ”

“Don’t I know, indeed! ” was the gratified retort. “And as to being almost as nice as me, you blind little bat, why she’s at least one hundred and fifty times as nice. Even bread and butter is nicer than I am; at least, it would be just now.”

Rose laughed and clapped her hands.

“How funny that you should say that! Miss Crofton sent me to say that Josephine and I might have tea here if you were awake and would like it. She told me to say‘and if you would not mind seeing us eat bread and butter.’ ”

“Not if I may share it; certainly not.”

“Ah,” said Rose, rather crestfallen, “but that, I am afraid, is just what you must not do. The doctor said you were not to have anything solid till to-morrow.”

“Then he’s a solid old humbug, and I’ve a good mind to swallow all the brass knobs of the bedstead this minute.”

“Swallow what, my dear?” asked a bright, pleasant voice in a tone of astonishment.

Helen raised herself with a glad cry, and stretched out her hands—“0 Madam, Madam! how nice to see you again! I did talk of swallowing the bed-knobs to revenge myself on the doctor. But I’ll swallow my indignation instead now.”

Miss Crofton smiled, as much in gladness at her pupil’s recovered strength as at her speech.

“What is the complaint you have against the doctor, lassie? I can assure you that he has been very good and kind to you.”

“Maybe, Madam,” with a doubtful little pout. “But he is shockingly stingy on the article of bread and butter.”

CHAPTER XXXI.

“WISE AS SERPENTS, HARMLESS AS DOVES.”

“Helen! 0 Helen! I want to dance up to the moon!” exclaimed Rosie Bell, by way of morning greeting one day, as she danced into her schoolfellow’s room.

Helen- Edison’s convalescence was sufficiently assured not - to be very greatly endangered by any ordinary shock, but nevertheless the colour that rushed into her cheeks was somewhat too brilliant as she looked at the child’s beamingly happy face, and started forward to ask what caused her excitement.

“Come here, little one,” called Mrs. Edison; “come here and sit down, and tell Helen you are to give her no explanation until she comes back to her breakfast. To-morrow morning,” added the mother, smiling, and addressing her daughter, “you shall have it in bed again by way of punishment for getting up from the table in this fashion.”

“Suppose I sit on the bed to eat my dinner to-day instead, please ma’am?” was asked demurely and with folded hands; and then an eager return to the little schoolfellow.

“But now, Rosie, out with that news of yours. It will burn a hole in your mouth, as money does in my pocket.”

“I think it’s much more likely to serve me as that sugar-plum did yesterday, and choke me,” laughed the child. “But you know, Helen, I ought not to have made you think so much about it, for it is nothing much to concern you, after all; excepting as you care about me and Josephine. For they are not your papa and mamma, you see, and you don’t even know them a weeny bit.”

As Bose finished this long and somewhat incoherent speech, she wound up breathlessly . with a “Don’t, Helen! how can you? What an ugly face! ”

Mrs. Edison also laughingly ejaculated, “Don’t, Helen; you look a perfect little fright.”

“‘ Little,’ mamma? ” was the slow, grave inquiry; “rather a lanky * little,’ isn’t it? But I am sorry I look a fright. I only ought to look stupid, as I feel. Rose has been telling me something that is harder to understand than German grammar, and yet she understands it all, though she is such a mite. I wonder whether if I parsed it I should make out the sense better.‘ Your,’ pronoun—possessive pronoun. That means mine-”

“0 Helen! I said-”

“And I said,‘ Hush, Rosie; don’t interrupt.’‘Papa and mamma/ nouns, active nouns—at least, sometimes—they are under the head of Varieties, I suppose — not always amusing. Then ‘weeny’—Greek participle—obsolete— word used by pre-Adamite man—no longer understanded of the common people.’ No, Rosie, I give it up. The only bit I understand is the active nouns.”

“And you certainly don’t understand them,” was the retort, with a toss of the golden curls. “For you said they were yours, and all the while they are mine, and they are coming home to England, and then you’ll see. And, oh! I—I—am so glad!”

And, to prove her gladness, with those last words the child jumped off her chair and ran to hide her face and tear-filled eyes in Mrs. Edison’s lap. And Helen tried to get out an, “Oh! I am so glad for you both, Rosie! ” but her voice choked before she could finish the sentence, and the tears rolled down her cheeks instead.

Josephine looked as really puzzled when she came into the room as Helen had pretended to be.

“Has Rosie hurt herself? Is Helen worse? ” she asked anxiously.

Mrs. Edison opened her lips to reply, but Miss Nellie was too quick for her.

“Worse! I should think I am worse, indeed. Riddles are bad enough when they are served up as dessert in the evening with chestnuts and a big fire. But administered raw, in the morning, they are simply awful.”

“Then you certainly should not be administering them to me,” said Josephine, smiling. “What is the matter? ”

“Riddle, you mean. Why, given a papa and mamma bound to stay in India another three years, how can they be coming home in three months! That mean little thing, Rose, hid her face, so as not to tell us the answer.”

“0 Helen!” expostulated a rosebud mouth, as an April little face raised itself from Mrs. Edison’s lap to lean itself instead against that lady’s arm.

But little heed was paid to the expostulation, as Nellie pulled the elder sister down on to the half of her own chair and repeated her demand fox explanations.

“They are very simple, after all,” said Josephine, with a tremor of gladness in her voice. “ There is some important Government inquiry going on over here into some Indian affairs. And it seems that our father has made himself so much better acquainted with the matter than any one else, that it has been found almost necessary to send for him, to discuss and help to arrange the business. Mamma says it is considered that he has won great honour for himself, and at any rate he has won great happiness for us.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Edison, with the heartiest sympathy. “I don’t wonder that you are both bright at the unexpected prospect before you. It will make an especially great difference to you, Josephine, too, I suppose, for no doubt you will live at home with your mother % ”

“Yes; so mamma says,” was the glad answer. “I am to have a teacher at home, and learn under mamma’s own help and guidance.”

“What do you mean? ” asked Helen, in a tone suddenly grown so sharp and hard that all her hearers started. She drew away the hand linked in Josephine’s arm, and tamed to face her as she put her imperious question. The gladness that had begun to make the’ pale, careworn face more like those around it died away, and the old look of troubled perplexity gave all the answer Josephine found power to make.

Helen shrugged her shoulders impatiently, and pushed her plate from her, as she said, passionately, “Oh, of course. You are just like everybody else, after all; I was a ridiculous donkey to suppose anything else.. You were willing to do a good work here, so long as it was no bother to you, but the very moment there’s anything nicer you rush off as if the place were on fire. Very well, then. Only I tell you this, you need not be surprised, if you leave me, to hear that I have fallen back into being as bad as ever again.” .

“That cannot be much worse than you are showing yourself while she is still with you, Helen,” said Mrs. Edison, in a voice of shocked reproach. “Where is your hope suddenly fled to that you would never again let self usurp the whole of your thoughts? 0 Helen, my child! truly you make me ashamed of you, and still more ashamed of myself! I am beginning to learn, but almost too late, I am afraid, that I must have been cruelly injudicious in your upbringing to foster you so in selfishness.”

Mrs. Edison stopped speaking, and Rose, who had been looking in great bewilderment at her companions, echoed the word “selfishness,” as though she could not believe her ears.

“Please, ma’am, you don’t mean that Helen is selfish, do you? ”

“Ay, indeed, little one. What is it but selfish to want to keep Josephine here, instead of rejoicing that she should go home to be with your mamma! ”

However, instead of looking convinced, Rose only answered, “Ah! but that is because she is so nice, and loves Josephine so much.”

“Of course it is,” broke in Helen, but with the passion in her voice changing into a sort of doleful little growl. “And because I look up to her so much, and because I trust her so much, that i know it is no good for me to hope to leave off being a plague if I haven’t her to help me.” Josephine began to smile again. “I think you are flattering me, Nellie, as you do when you say that I shall find out some day that I have learnt as much as most people,”

“That’s not flattery.”

“Well, at any rate it is pleasant to believe, and a help to me too. And if—if—” (timidly) “yon really think I can be of any little help to you, I will tell mamma I should like to stay another term.”

Helen put up her hand again, not to her schoolfellow’s arm this time, but around her waist. “You’ll do no such thing, my dear. But I wish Milly Wilmot were here now.”

“Why do you wish that? ” asked three voices at once.

“Because when X told her, a few clays ago, that Josephine was the sort of stuff martyrs and missionaries are made out of, she said,‘Nonsense, girl-stuff was never strong enough for that sort of wear.’ And now she could just see who was right.”

“And do you mean that it was only to prove this that you spoke and acted as you did just now ? ” asked Mrs. Edison.

“Not altogether,” was the answer, with a grim little smile. “The fact is, mamma, as I heard that dear, wise old Doctor Humbug telling you yesterday, my nerves are rather weak just .now, and Josephine’s announcement came without any preparation, like a bombshell into the midst of all my diligently matured plans, hopes, and aspirations for the coming term. And, really and truly, do you know I think you had better take me away now, before I get into any more scrapes; for whatever I shall do without this dear old Josie I don’t know.” “‘Take care of me,’ Josie said,” whispered Rosie, coaxingly, as she slipped her little hand into Helen’s.

Helen’s eyes opened, and the expression in their dark depths deepened and softened wonderfully. “Did Josie really say that? ” she asked, in almost as low a whisper as the child’s.

Josephine answered for herself.. “Yes, Nellie. I hoped that you would. I wish you would. It would make me so happy and at rest about her to think she had you for her friend here.” “You would really trust me, and trust me gladly, to look after your pet and darling? ” “Ay, indeed. Only help her to grow as worthy of love as you are yourself, and I shall be content, and papa and mamma also,” was the hearty answer.

And Helen laid her cheek against her companion’s, and said quietly, “Clever Josephine.” Soon after the two sisters went off together, and as the door closed behind them Mrs. Edison asked, “What was your thought, my child, a while ago, when you said,‘ Clever Josephine? ’ Can you tell me? ”

Helen was seated on the floor before the fire with her head resting on her mother’s knees, but she looked up now as she answered, “Since she is not going to stay with me any longer herself, she is leaving her trust in’ me for my safeguard.”

“And you will not abuse it?”

“Please God, never! ”

“Clever Josephine,” murmured the mother in her heart, as she also uttered a prayer and & fervent blessing.

CHAPTER XXXII.

A CHANGE FOR MISS ROWE.

It wanted but one day to the end of the Easter holidays, but one day to many changes in the small world of Crofton House.

“And who of us all, I wonder, will be most affected by the changes?”

It was Helen Edison who spoke, and she looked round at the little group gathered with her about the fire in the back-room—good-natured little Fraulein, the two Bells, and her mother.

There had been a long silence in the room, when Helen broke it abruptly by her remark, following a habit common with her of uttering aloud the climax to a long train of thought. The softly spoken exclamation had so little to do with Fraulein’s merry German song, which had been the last subject under discussion, that no one was immediately ready with an answer. At last Mrs. Edison said with a slight smile, “If your enigmatical speech, Nellie child, refers to the changes here, I should think there can be no shadow of a doubt that Miss Bell will be the one to feel the change most greatly.”

“I don’t know that, mamma,” answered Helen. “I decided so at first; but the more I turn the matter over in my mind the more doubtful I grow. There is Rose, you know, without her sister.”

A deep sigh from that small maiden announced her opinion of the serious importance of that change. Helen continued, “Then there is the change to me of having to learn to alter from a monkey into a human being. That will be an awfully tremendous change, I can tell you, let alone the horrid change of having to learn to do Without Josephine. But, do you know, the person who I think will surely feel these changes most of all will be Miss Rowe.”

“The change from taking charge of a monkey to teaching a human being, you mean? ” asked Mrs. Edison, laughing.

Helen laughed too. “No, mamma, great as that change will, no doubt, be, I do not mean that. What I have been thinking of is the different position she will hold in the school this next term, and I am afraid she will feel it very much indeed. You see, last term she was next in authority to Miss Crofton herself. When Miss Crofton was away Miss Rowe was supreme.”

“Excepting where a certain obstreperous young lady, whom we know, was concerned.” “Ay, and even there. For the unfortunate referred to did have to submit very often, poor thing! whatever you may think about the matter, and though she kicked sometimes. But now, only think what a contrast Miss Rowe will feel it now that Mrs Gray is coming back again to take her own post once more.”

“That Meesis Gray is verry nice, meine liebe,” said Fraulein reassuringly.

But Helen shook her head. “So she may be nice. I suppose she is, since you all say so. Miss Crofton says that I shall learn to like her better than I love herself, which, of course, is absurd. But however all this may be, it cannot prevent poor Miss Rowe from feeling that she is gone down in the scale.”

“How glad you would have been a few weeks ago,” said Mrs. Edison gently, “that she should have this painful experience.”

Helen looked up quickly. “Why, mamma, that is the very thing. It is just knowing how tremendously delighted I should have been at her deposition, before I got my head cracked-”

“My dear child! ” in remonstrance, “where do you get such expressions from? Not from your father or me, I know.”

“No, mother dear, it’s innate genius. Milly Wilmot says I’m quite a prodigy in those sorts of ways. But I was going to say, it is because of knowing how glad I should have been in those once-upon-a-time days that I claim to understand better than any of you, better than any one else, what sort of a trial it will be to her to seem to sink lower before us alL It is the pretty general opinion here that I was rather clever in inventing ways to annoy her, I would gladly manage to show some cleverness in inventing a way to spare her some portion of this vexation.” As Helen proceeded in the above little speech the face of her schoolfellow, Josephine Bell, had been growing more and more intent, and she now bent forward and laid her hand on the little ones lying folded on her companion’s lap, as she asked eagerly, “You do really feel like that, Nellie? You do really wish that Miss Rowe should be spared any pain, or—or—as you say, vexation perhaps, that she might be caused by having to submit to quite a different position here, to what she was able to hold last term? You really would be sorry for her? ”

Helen looked searchingly at the face bent towards her. “Really would be sorry? Josie, what do you mean?—what is in your mind? You are hiding something from me, and you are not clever at deception. Out with it. Tell me what you are thinking of. Is anything more going to happen that I know nothing about!” There was no answer. Helen looked steadfastly at Josephine, then raised her eyes to the countenances of the others of the party, then back to Josephine again. But still there was silence.

“Well,” said the clear, quick voice at last, “why have I been kept in the dark about this other change that is to take place? ”

“Because I was afraid to tell you—you have said you don’t like changes.”

“And so, on the strength of that admission, my friends are benevolent enough to administer them to me in the form of thunder-claps? Very considerate of them, I’m sure. You, at least, might have been kinder to me, surely, mamma.” There was a suspicious tremor’ in the girl’s voice as she uttered the last expostulation, speaking of genuine distress, and Mrs. Edison answered instantly, “I am not to blame in the matter, dear child. I know as little as yourself to what Josephine can be referring.”

“And I—I Lave not the leetle hint,” added Fiaulein.

“Oh!” ejaculated Helen, beginning to look much relieved. “Then I suppose the Boheme, whatever it is, is still safely stowed away in Josie’s own brain. Is it open to discussion, Josie?”

But the half-laughing question met no smiling response. Indeed, Josephine’s countenance expressed more distress than before as she answered in slow, hesitating tones, “I am afraid there will not be much use in discussing the thing now, for it’s done. Miss Rowe’s letter this morning quite settles it.”

Helen sprang up from her chair with an impatient light in her eyes. “0 Josie! you are trying to-day! What thing is done? What does Miss Rowe’s letter settle? ”

“About her coming to be with me.”

Helen sat down again without a word. She understood it all now. She had little need of the explanations which, after a long pause, Josephine proceeded to give, of how this last great change had been brought about. The new home which Mr. Bell had commissioned his friend to rent for him during his stay in England was within a mile of the Rowes’ cottage, and when Josephine received a letter from her mother, telling her to lose no time in securing a companion teacher for herself, aided by Miss Crofton’s kind and valuable assistance, her thoughts at once turned to the young governess, who had written to accept the offer, which would keep her so close to her home, with the deepest gratitude.

“And won’t it be a most beautifully delightful happy thing for Harry, don’t you think, Helen ? ” exclaimed little Rose eagerly, her face bright with sympathy. Her favourite schoolfellow, however, was not just then in tone to be quite so enthusiastic about the matter.

“Oh, I suppose he’ll like it,” she said grimly. “Everything seems to be going to be beautifully delightful for every one but myself. Mamma, do you think I’ve a right just now to quote on my own account poor old Jacob’s words and say, *All these things are against me ’? ”

A smile flitted for a moment over Mrs. Edison’s face as she ejaculated, “My poor little hardly used daughter!” But the smile disappeared, and she looked very serious as she added earnestly, “No, my child; indeed no. So far from adopting the patriarch’s sad and bitter cry, you should sing with the Psalmist,‘Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, and forget not all His benefits. . . . Who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies.’ For my part, I see in the changes now taking place about you the tender care of that most gracious and loving Father who watches over even the most insignificant of His straying lambs, and takes care that none are tempted above that they are able to bear. The mutual efforts of you and Miss Rowe after patience, gentleness, and forbearance are as yet very new. It is more than possible that in the hurry and wear of hard school-work you would both break down in your good resolutions, if you came too much in contact before they have had time to grow mature.”

Helen shook her head. “But, mamma, how am I ever to know if there is any improvement if I am never tried? ”

“Never tried, indeed! Why you are being tried now, and,” with a rather mischievous smile, “ not coming out of the trial quite with flying colours, although there is a decided improvement in your manner of receiving Josephine’s other important piece of news. If you go on improving at this rapid rate we shall have to frame you as a sort of pattern-sampler.”

“Or make me into a caravan exhibition—‘ To be shown at a penny a head, the Patience Prodigy!’ Don’t you come to see me, Rose, for they’ll have to feed me on live children to keep me in a properly docile condition.”

“What are you talking about now, my queer lassie? ” asked Miss Crofton, who had just come into the room with a letter in her hand. “I never knew before that the baby-eating ogres were considered patterns of docility. But here is a letter for you which may agree with you better at present than a cannibal meal.”

Helen’s bright eyes, as she saw the handwriting, gave full assent to this supposition.

“It is from papa,” she announced gladly. “An answer, of course, to my one about little Harry. 0 Madam Josephine! you may be giving Miss Rowe the pleasure of living near her brother, but if I were a sister I know I should think a thousand times more of the pleasure that I shall have helped to give them.” “What is that?” asked Miss Crofton, drawing in a chair beside Helen Edison, and joining the little circle about the fire. “What pleasure do you hope to procure them, my lassie, that can compare with the pleasure of being together? ”

“Why, honour and glory, to be sure,” replied Helen, with glowing cheeks. “The exquisite pleasure of having the world recognize that her brother has performed a splendid action. Is not that worth ever so much more than seeing each other!”

“To some people, no doubt,” was the grave, low-spoken answer. “The Spartan mothers of old felt with you, and so have many women since. But it is not given to all to have such courage for those they care for.”

“Not to me, for one, I fear,” said Mrs. Edison. “But open your letter, child, and see what your father says. You know you are making very sure of little Harry having that medal, before you have heard if there is even the slightest chance of his getting it.”

“Slightest chance! ” repeated Helen, half indignantly. “0 mamma! how can you? Who can have done anything much braver than Harry did to save a life? And now that papa knows all about it, and can tell all about it, what doubt can I or any one else have on the subject? But never mind, you’ll soon hear.”

So saying Helen tore open her envelope and drew out the letter, with the chief contents of which she believed herself already so well acquainted. She began aloud in a triumphant tone,—“My own dearest Daughter,—I am so thankful to receive such good accounts of your restored health. Your account of that fine little fellow’s noble act has greatly interested me. Something certainly should lie done for him, although—although—I—I-”

Helen’s voice wavered—stammered—stopped. Her eyes rapidly ran over the next few words, then, with a low cry, the paper fell from her hands, she started to her feet, and turned to run out of the room. Instead, however, of accomplishing her purpose she ran into Miss Crofton’s outstretched arms, who held her close, while she said tenderly, “My poor little lassie! What is it now? You seem to be always in trouble.”

“Yes, yes; so I say—always in trouble! ” readily assented Helen, ceasing to struggle for freedom when she found her captor so in accord with her own sentiments. “I told mamma just now that I am like Jacob with his‘ All these things are against me,’ and so I am.”

“My dear, my dear,” began the Principal, vainly trying to steady her voice, and then breaking into uncontrollable laughter she exclaimed, “0 Helen, my dear, you must forgive me; but you are so odd! What does the child mean by being like—like—Jacob? ”

A rueful little smile lurked around Miss Nellie’s own lips as she answered for her-self, “So I am. He lost his children, and I am losing, one after another, all my hopes and plans. And they were nearly all of them hopes and plans for other people. I am sure if things go on like this it will be a proof that it is ever so much best to be selfish.”

“Ever so much best, you mean, my Nellie, or ought to mean,” said Mrs. Edison gently, “to learn, not only to be unselfish, but also to say meekly,‘ Thy will be done I ’ But why does your father say that Harry cannot have the medal?—for I suppose we may guess that much from your doleful looks.”

“Yes, indeed; and all because that baby— the tiresome little thing—tumbled under a train instead of into the water. It really deserves a good pinch.”

“0 Helen! how can you?” murmured Rose in a shocked whisper. “And Harry’s mamma says it is such a dear little baby.”

“She won’t call it a ‘de-e-ar’ little baby— aggravating little creature—when she hears that it has lost her‘ de-e-ar’ little boy a medal, I can tell you.”

“But, Nellie,” remonstrated Josephine, “you accused me of talking in riddles a while ago, and I am sure that you are doing it now. What can that poor little baby have to do with Harry not getting a medal? ”

“Why, don’t I tell you? If it had tumbled into the water, and Harry Rowe had fished it out, he could have been eligible for one; but as, instead, he saved it from being scrunched up by a train, he isn’t eligible for anything.”

“Except,” said Miss Crofton slowly, “the loving admiration of all those who know him, or who hear of his gallant deed. But, of course, gold medals and parchments are to be prized far above that.”

“No, they are not,” was the abrupt contradiction. Then, with a blush, Helen added, “I beg your pardon, Madam; I did not mean to speak like that, but I think you are all rather hard on me to-day. It was not for Harry’s sake, but for Miss Rowe’s, that I wished him to get the medal. And the more love and admiration she and her mother give him, the more they would have rejoiced over that public acknowledgment of his deed; and—and—Miss Rowe did look so pleased when- But please let me go now. I will come back soon.”

And with that petition Helen escaped, and ran off to have a hearty cry by herself over her disappointment and the disappointment of her former antagonist. She never had a harder task in her life than the self-appointed one which she performed that night, of writing to tell Miss Rowe the doleful news that the highly prized medals of the Royal Humane Society were given only for the rescue of people from the perils of the water, and that she had raised hopes not to be realised.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

“FOR THE SAKE OF ROSIE.”

“Clear decks for action! Land-lubbers, below hatches! Rose Bell and Clara Boswell, that means under the chairs. Be quick with you. Clear decks, I say I Now, one—two—three— hurrah! Three cheers for one, and cat-o’-ninetails for two.”

The above commands had been delivered by a clear, ringing voice from one end of the large class-room of Crofton House, and between the utterance of the • “one—two—three ” and the “ hurrah! ” the owner of the voice, a certain slim, bright-eyed, curly-haired young damsel, had taken a rush down the room and a flying leap over the poker, laid across the backs of two chairs.

“Now, Rose,”exclaimed Milly Wilmot, “make haste; it’s your turn now. You know monkeys copy their masters.”

“Ah, to be sure,” said the heroine of the jump. “So that is why you try to copy me.”

The absurdity of roly-poly Milly being accused of copying Miss Nelly in looks, manners, or gymnastics was too great for even Sybil Pinckney’s well-bred kindness; and as for Clara Boswell, ever since the commencement of the summer term she had been amongst the most inveterate aiders and abettors of those who combined to do all in their power to spoil the school favourite, Helen Edison.

“She cannot be spoiled. She is the brightest-tempered, noblest-hearted girl that ever lived,” she declared; and so she laughed at all her jokes, applauded all her athletic feats, seconded all her petitions to the Principal, and had that splendid, all-important influence over her that a high-principled, well-cultivated girl always has over those whom she really admits to her true friendship.

And “winsome Nellie,” as Mrs. Gray had nicknamed her, deserved the friendship. The meek and gentle teaching of Josephine Bell had fallen into good soil, and the sterner, stronger nature of Clara Boswell aided its development. Last, but not least, the trust confided to her of little Hose proved all that the friend and sister had hoped in the way of restraint, and aid to good; and many of those who knew Helen best would have been surprised had they read the letters which passed between the two friends. The half-protecting, half-clinging love which the younger and more brilliant girl had bestowed upon her less talented companion bore most precious fruit, and each succeeding letter contained increasing proof that, while she was throwing much of brightness over the outer life of her friend, she herself was learning to share meek Josephine’s most precious knowledge of the way of salvation and the paths of peace.

But if any one supposes that there was any great outward change visible in the school will-o’-the-wisp I am afraid they must be disappointed. That leap over the poker took place on the morning of the day before the summer holidays were to begin, or rather, it should be said, on the day before the pupils went home, for the last day at school was always a holiday at Crofton House—a day given up to packing, arranging books and cupboards, and generally saying good-bye to the ending term.

It was a little after ten now, and the half-dozen girls gathered together in the class-room had been very busy upstairs till within the past few minutes. Their companions were all still engaged over boxes and portmanteaus—“Poor old slowcoaches,” as Milly “Wilmot irreverently termed them.

“Who’ll jump next?” asked Helen, looking round at her companions with glances as scrutinisingly earnest as though she were a general organising a forlorn hope. And, if she expected any of those present to take the same jump she had just achieved, most people would have declared it was a very forlorn hope indeed. However, Rosie Bell and Rose Trew both came forward bravely as volunteers.

“Not you, Rosie,” with a grave, reluctant shake of the head. “I have a foolish fancy in favour of delivering you up to Josephine tomorrow with unbroken legs and sound ankles. Rose Trew, you are much too pretty to break your nose against a poker. Besides, you have about a yard and a half of braid hanging to your dress already, and most of your hairpins ready to drop out. Putting those small matters right will be quite enough to keep your little hands out of mischief for the present. Kate Griffin might jump if she were not so busy over that story-book.”

“Then you are reduced to me after all, Madame Nelly,” laughed Milly Wilmot.

“In “which case, ladies, the performance is at an end, seeing the proprietress of this establishment has not yet insured her ceilings and glass windows. At least-”

And Nelly suddenly sprang back over the poker, and with one bound to Clara Boswell’s side.

“Clara I my tall, grand, dignified Clara!— my dear, departing schoolfellow, soon to be * late of Crofton House,’ do me this one final favour. Prove that you deserve, not only your riding-master’s praises, but also those far more discriminating ones of Miss Helen Edison. Behold the poker; oblige me by passing over it with equal grace and nimbleness to the other side.”

“You audacious little puss!” exclaimed a voice just inside the door, which had been opened a minute since unperceived. “You impudent little lassie! you will be inviting me next to have a Bee-saw with you, I should expect.”

“Ah, dear Madam, I would take such care that you should not slip,” was the laughing answer, as the girl ran forward to Miss Crofton and laid her cheek caressingly on her hand.

“At any rate, I won’t tempt your promise,” was the equally laughing reply. “But am I to understand that you six have quite finished your packing? ”

“Quite, quite,” was the answer in chorus, with the addition from Helen Edison, “Except that my box, the biggest one, is to be all turned out again.”

“And pray wherefore? ”

“Because it has aggravatingly puffed itself up somehow, so that, even with Milly Wilmot sitting on the lid, it won’t shut. I have done up the straps, all the same; but, as Clara thinks that most of my things would tumble out during the journey if it travelled as it is, I am going to let her pack it for me over again.”

“‘ Let her,’ indeed! ” said Miss Croffcon, between amusement and earnestness. “You self-indulgent lassie! ”

“Not self-indulgent this time,” was the serious answer, somewhat contradicted by a tiny smile hovering over the crimson lips. “Clara asked me to let her pack for me. She said it broke her heart to see my clothes so cruelly ill-used. And I like her heart so much I could not bear to see it broken. But, please, will you tell us now what else you came in to speak about? It was not only packing, I think.”

No. Helen was right. The kind Principal had been standing a few minutes at her open window admiring the lovely summer day, and the thought had come to her that, although lovely summer days are happily by no means rare, whatever grumblers may say, still it was a pity that a party of young, happy girls should lose even one of them indoors.

With that pleasant incentive to brisk work, a picnic in the woods, packing was soon accomplished by even the most dilatory, and even Helen Edison’s obstreperous box was coaxed into good behaviour under Clara Boswell’s tidy and judicious treatment.

“What an untidy little creature Rosie Bell will grow up! ” said Clara quietly, as Helen knelt beside her to refasten the straps.

“Untidy!” echoed Helen, turning her face quickly to her companion. “No, indeed, she shall not; I will take care of that. Josephine is the very pattern of tidiness, and it would vex her terribly to have Bose different.”

“So I fear,” said Clara once more quietly. “But example goes so much farther than precept. Bose loves you now almost as much as she loves Josephine, and she admires you far more.”

“Then she ought not, and she is a silly little thing.”

“Just so. Such a silly little thing that she •will consider the mere fact that her wonderful schoolfellow, Helen Edison, is untidy proves that untidiness is a virtue. If Miss Rowe had still been here, and you had still gone on defying her, poor little Rosie would have learnt to think that a fine thing to imitate too. But forgive me, Nelly, darling, you will think I am paying myself finely for the little bit of help I have given you. I did not mean to preach to you the last day we are together. You are not vexed, are you? ”

Helen’s answer was a queer one, as many of her answers were—“Clever Josephine! I would never have won the triumph of hearing you call me‘ Nelly, darling,’ but for her. For your sake and for hers Rosie shall learn to value tidiness.”

“And for its own sake!”

“Umph,” with a mischievous little smile. “Be quick and put your hat on. I’ll show you such lovely little bits of untidiness in the woods and hedges to-day.”

CHAPTER XXXIV.

A MEDAL AFTER ALL, AND SOMETHING MORE.

The little town of Merton, with its beautiful old church, its sparkling river, and flourishing schools, is as pretty a town as any to be found within thirty miles of the metropolis. The only wonder is, as Mr. and Mrs. Bell remarked when they first saw it, that it is so little known. However, it was so little known a few years ago that the one little rustic, unpretending inn, the “George and Dragon,” was, as a rule, quite sufficient to supply all the accommodation demanded by the better class of travellers.

Just on the outskirts of Merton stood the jessamine-covered cottage of the Rowes, and just beyond the outskirts of Merton, on the other side, were the house and grounds to which the friends were returned with whom Josephine and Rosa Bell had stayed when they first made acquaintance with Mrs. Rowe. The little estate rented now by the Bells was in the Bame neighbourhood, and on one fine afternoon in August all these homes were in a state of great commotion.

No doubt the reader remembers a certain afternoon during the past Easter holidays, when Helen Edison was sorely distressed by hearing from her father that he had not the power to obtain the Royal Humane Society’s medal for Harry Rowe. It may be also remembered, although Helen was too grieved to pay any attention to that at the time, that her father softened the intimation as much as he could, by writing his opinion that nevertheless something should be done for the little hero. As the weeks had passed on what this something should be had gradually taken a definite form. General and Mrs. Edison had travelled to Merton expressly to visit the family in whose welfare their only child took so great an interest, and their warmest sympathies were won as much by the widowed mother as by her manly little son, who shrank so modestly from the praises showered upon him for his deed.

From the Rowes’ cottage the Edisons had driven to the Bells’ place to see Miss Rowe and Josephine, and while there a long conversation had been held of high interest to Helen’s wishes, and Harry Rowe’s future life.’

Mr. and Mrs. Bell had so warmly agreed that something should be done for the boy that General Edison had fairly been wrought up to nearly the pitch of enthusiasm desired by his daughter, and before he left Merton’ Lodge he declared that he would not rest until he had secured for Harry some advantage more substantial than a bit of ribbon or a medal.

“But I don’t think Helen will be quite satisfied without the medal,” said Mrs. Edison, smiling.

“Perhaps she would like to present him with one herself,” was the laughing answer.

As matters turned out, Nelly was not put to this trouble, and at the same time her desire as to a medal was fulfilled. The visits paid to the Rowes’ cottage by the Bells, their friends the Andersons, and the Edisons, suddenly aroused Harry’s townsfolk to the consciousness that he had performed a noteworthy action that it would be well, for their own credit’s sake, to take some notice of.

The first idea of some town magnate, as ignorant on that point as Helen and Miss Rowe, had been to obtain for his young townsfellow a medal decorated with the well-known letters “E. H. S.” When he found that was impossible he exclaimed magnificently, “Then the town of Merton shall give a medal itself! ”

“The town of Merton shall give a medal itself,” echoed all his hearers in chorus, and with three cheers for the genius who had hit upon such a capital idea.

“And the town of Merton is a jolly little town, and deserves a pat on the back for its good sense,” announced Nelly when her father called at Crofton House to tell her this piece of news.

“And the town of Merton is a most ridiculous little town,” announced General Edison, “and my ridiculous young daughter deserves to be put in the corner for praising it, and for using the word‘jolly.’ But, to reserve that matter for future grave consideration, let me give you the remainder of my budget of news, for my return train leaves in half an hour, and you will not Lave heard the quarter of what I have to tell The giving of the medal, ornamented with the arms of the important town of Merton, is to be followed by a dinner, to be given to Mrs. Eowe and her son at the grand one-storey high hotel, the‘George and Dragon.’ I tried to beg the poor child off that ordeal——”

“0 papa! ”

“Ay. * 0 papa,’ indeed. A child not eleven years old, and a shy child too, to have to sit up to be stared at and speechified at by a lot of old fog-well, a lot of kind-hearted but unreasonable individuals. But there, you are as bad as they are. And his sister—ay, actually his sister—with all her stem common sense—is worse than any of you. She literally quivered to the tips of her toes with delight when she was told of the honour to be done her brother.”

“I should think so,” was the emphatic answer. And then Miss Nelly crept close to her father and whispered, “That is just exactly how I quivered four years ago when they told me my father was to have the Victoria Cross. 0 papa! you don’t know what it is to be very, very proud of the people one loves.”

If General Edison did not know that, he at any rate knew how to be very indulgent to the fancies of those he cared for, and so far from putting any more obstacles in the way of the proposed ceremonies, he aided largely in giving them a certain element of dignity they would most assuredly have lacked without his efforts. Thus it came to pass that about a fortnight after the commencement of the Crofton House summer holidays the town of Merton was in an unwonted state of excitement, and the “George and Dragon Inn ” in a tremendous state of bustling preparation.

Not only the kitchen powers of that modest establishment were being called upon to the utmost, but its sleeping accommodation also. Some unknown friends of General Edison’s had arrived the night before, and the good-tempered landlady had been divided between rejoicing and bewilderment as to where to put them.

“Three of them, Jem! ” as she murmured in dismay to her husband, “and each of them that grand, and to have a separate room!”

“Well then,” answered Jem, “we can’t do it, you know.”

“But we must do it,” was the positive answer. “Turn folks away once, and, you mark my words, they’ll not come again. No, no. Put ’em up we must, if you have to build a room on the roof this night yourself.”

“What? My gracious!” ejaculated red-haired Jem, in frightened amazement. “The woman’s gone daft. -Ye won’t find me on the roof, not this night, nor any night, I can tell ye, not for all the fine gentlefolks in the world. I’ll dinner them and I’ll supper them, but if they want rooms as I haven’t got to give them, they may go elsewhere. They won’t catch me doing monkey tricks for them; no nor for nobody else, and so I tell you fairly.”

“All right, Jem,” said his wife, lifting her laughing face to his indignant one. “I’ll not call upon you for the monkey tricks just yet awhile. All the same, you’ll not think me quite so daft when you get the money, the day after to-morrow, which I shall- have helped you to earn. And so now. go supper the gentlemen, since ye agree to that part of the bargain, while I see to their beds. There’s one thing, my places and linen are always sweet and clean, which they do say they are not always in London; and for the rest I’ll manage.”

And the clever woman did manage, and so-well for the comfort of her guests, that they audibly wondered the next morning at breakfast how they could have been so well housed in such a small inn.

“It’s all my wife’s doing, gentlemen,” said Jem, in subdued tones. “She’s clever as clever, she is. But it don’t do to tell her so, you see, for she gets notions in her head sometimes, and she’s a bit masterful.”

With which oracular statement Jem glanced up roofwards, and left the strangers to the enjoyment of their breakfast. About the same hour a very large party was gathered around the breakfast-table of the Bells. The Andersons, Clara Boswell, Milly Wilmot, Miss Crofton, good-natured little Fraulein, General and Mrs. Edison, and the Bells themselves of course.

The only absentee, of the group that might have been expected to be gathered together to do honour to that day, was the one who had looked forward to it with most eagerness.

“Where is your daughter, General?” asked Mrs. Anderson, in surprise, as she discovered her absence from the long table.

As she asked the question Helen Edison was standing in the Rowes’ little sitting-room making fast friends at first sight with Harry Rowe, and re-tying his neck-ribbon for him, with the declaration that his sister had not made it half becoming enough.

“And you know, Harry, you are bound to do credit to us all and look your best, for you are the hero of the day.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” Harry ventured to murmur, with a very heartfelt sigh, which Helen both literally and metaphorically strangled half-way, as she gave a sudden unintentional jerk to the necktie, and exclaimed indignantly, “Ok, you bad boy! bow dare you be so ungrateful? And such a beautiful day as it is going to be, too. I’m ashamed of you.”

“It would be a whole heap more beautiful,” muttered the incorrigible, “if you and I were going to spend it together fishing on the river. That would be really nice now, and you would not have to bother about this tie either. It does seem to be an awfully difficult one to settle.”

“You may well say that,” was the rueful reply. “I don’t think it is any use bothering about it any more. It’s got into a knot now, and looks just anyhow. I’m sure I don’t know what to do with the horrid thing.”

At this point Mrs. Rowe came to the rescue, produced another length of blue ribbon, untied the knotted one, and five minutes later the little party of five sat down to a meal which was made a very merry one by the uninvited guest. Thauks to her, before that breakfast was over Harry had got rid of much of the terror which that day had had for him for some weeks past.

At two o’clock all our friends, the three strangers staying at the “George and Dragon,” a dozen or two of the Merton magnates, and a miscellaneous crowd of sightseers, all assembled, with praiseworthy punctuality in the Town Hall. Foremost amongst the spectators was a smiling young woman, with a little girl’ in her arms dressed gorgeously in a new scarlet frock and white hat with a scarlet feather.

“I do like a bit of bright colour for a child,” she remarked confidentially to a neighbour.

“Ay, indeed,” answered the neighbour back. “And only to think if it hadn’t been for that dear little lad it’s not much like bright colours as you’d ha’ been feeling yourself to-day. But it was a nice thought of you to put the little maid into a new frock in his honour.”

“It wasn’t my doing,” said the mother, smiling. “Though I would have done it too. The things were all a gift from a young lady, sent through that dear, kind Miss Bell. Miss Bell has promised I shall thank the young lady myself. But, look—look—there they come I Good Master Bowe himself. Bless his heart, but he do look frightened, the dear lamb! A great deal more frightened than when he saved my Minnie. And there’s his poor mother! The dear Lord has blessed the widow in her boy, hasn’t He? And there’s Miss Bowe, grand and stately, to be sure; that she is always; but she is white, ain’t she. She always was a good daughter and a good sister. And there—oh, there is a bonny face for you! Of all the pretty young ladies as ever I saw I never see one to beat her.”

And so thought Josephine and Rosa Bell, and Clara Boswell and Milly Wilmot. And so thought Miss Crofton and Fraulein, and General and Mrs. Edison. And so thought most of the spectators in the Town Hall as all eyes rested for some moments on slim, tall Helen Edison, her cheeks flushed crimson, her dark eyes glowing, all of self forgotten in another’s triumph. It was true she was a hero-worshipper, but she was very keen in separating real claims from those of impostors.

One of the three strangers, a fine white-haired old gentleman, especially noticed her as she walked up the hall with the Rowes, and he bent forward and addressed a question to General Edison, sitting near him on the platform.

“Yes,” answered the General, smiling; “yes, Sir Edward, that is my daughter—the young maiden who was so anxious that little Rowe should be decorated with one of our Society’s medals.”

“Thank you,” said Sir Henry; and then he sank back in bis chair and turned his eyes once more back to Miss Nelly, and looked thoughtful. After a few minutes he held a short whispered conversation with one of his companions, who also then glanced quickly at Helen Edison, turned back to his friend with a smiling nod and the significant remark, “A capital idea of yours. She looks well fitted to be the young queen of the occasion.”

But although one or two people heard the words they were as electrified as was Helen herself, and all the rest of this assemblage, when, after Harry Rowe had been duly decorated with the Town Medal, the gentleman called Sir Henry rose, and, laying his hand on the child’s shoulder, to detain him on the platform, made the following short speech:—

“Mr. Chairman, my Ladies and Gentlemen, —Some few months ago, as you have all just been told in most elegant language, this brave boy here saved a fellow-creature’s life at the imminent risk of his own. A young lady heard of the deed, and with just enthusiasm declared that he deserved a medal as a lifelong testimony to his noble courage. Unfortunately the medal she set her heart upon his obtaining was that of the Royal Humane Society, of which her father, I, and my two friends here are members. Our awards, as, no doubt, most of you know, are given for rescues from drowning and other sea dangers. When the young lady in question learnt this unwelcome fact she expressed a wish, I am told, that the baby had been so obliging as to fall into the water instead of under a train. To prove to her that this change of accident was unnecessary, and to show her that, although as a body our marks’ of approval are restricted, yet as human beings our sympathies with grand actions are as free as her own, we and some other members of our Society have ventured to offer her for bestowal upon her hero the packet I have here. And if Miss Edison has as much pleasure in giving and Henry Eowe in receiving the gift, as we have in the presentation, our satisfaction will be complete.”

With his last words, and amidst a perfect tempest of applause from all the assembled Mertonites, Sir Henry stepped from the platform, gently led crimson-faced Nelly up with him beside her father, and, placing a packet in her trembling fingers, bade her open it, and do as she would with the contents.

It was a work of time to untie even a bow,

unwrap a coveting of brown paper, and a second of silver tissue-paper, and unclasp a morocco case, with all those eyes fixed upon her; but it was done at last, and then Helen suddenly forgot shyness in admiration, and exclaimed, “0 Harry, how beautiful! This is ever so much better than a medal. I wonder if there is any writing inside.”

And when the outer ease of the beautiful gold watch was opened it was found that there was writing inside, that is to say, an engraved inscription; and, with bright tears of gladness shining in her eyes, Helen passed the chain over Harry’s neck more cleverly than she had tied his neck-ribbon, and put the presentation watch in bis pocket. Half an hour later the dinner party was seated around the long flower-adorned table at the “George and Dragon; ” and Harry was not the youngest guest present after all, for at Sir Henry’s suggestion the little rescued child was there also, with her mother, in all the splendour of the scarlet frock given her by Helen. The entertainment itself was not half such an awful and solemn affair as General Edison had anticipated; but, nevertheless, all our immediate friends were well pleased to find themselves soon after six o’clock gathered together for tea and strawberries on the Bells’ lawn. Of course the Bowes were there, all of them, including Harry s elder brother, who had come home the previous day to rejoice in his young brother’s triumph.

And during the course of that happy evening other gifts were bestowed upon the Rowes—gifts that the three elders of the family knew how to esteem even more highly than gold watches and the medal of the self-important little town of Merton.

Josephine Bell had not lost sight of the fact that Miss Rowe was sorely anxious on the score of procuring good education for her little brother, and through her intercession a nomination to Merchant Taylors’ had been given to her father by a friend, to present to whom he would. Thus in the afternoon Helen Edison had the pleasure of adorning Harry with a gold watch; at night Josephine had the happiness of giving news to his mother and sister that his education was provided for. Each helped to confer the gift they could best appreciate.

“And how do you get on yourself now, Josie, with that learning which you think so much of? ” asked Helen later in the evening, drawing her friend away with her to a far comer for a quiet chat.

“Do you still find it all pain and struggle, as you said once at Crofton House? ”

Josephine smiled brightly. She could smile now. The heaviness had gone from her eyes and the pallor from her cheeks.

“No, Nelly, it is not all pain and struggle now indeed! It is still hard work sometimes to understand as much in things as other people appear able to do; but Miss Eowe says that my rapid improvement ought to be sufficient reproof to me for grumbling at that. You cannot imagine what a wonderful difference the quietude of home makes to me, and the having the undivided patient attention of Miss Eowe. I used to spend days sometimes—yes, Nelly, really days—in puzzling over some tiresome little trifle which Miss Eowe can now teach me to understand in as many minutes.”

Helen looked thoughtful. “Yes,” she said quietly, “Miss Crofton is quite right. School is the only place for some girls—girls like me, for instance, who are learning to think themselves perfect and all-important at home. But for girls like you, whose whole object in life is to put themselves on one side, Miss Crofton says, and I say, school is a mistake. There are so many people there ready to put them on one side that at last they creep into a bush altogether, and get smothered, as you were nearly doing when I first—”

Nelly stopped abruptly.’

“Finish your sentence, Nelly,” said Josephine softly. “When you first came and rescued me. Without your bright encouragement and ready help I should never have got out of that * slough of despond.’ ”

“Hush, Josie,” whispered Helen; “don’t you know I am trying to learn humility. You will spoil it all. Good-night now, dear, and God bless, you, Josie, for teaching me the way to Christ’s footstool. Don’t forget; I will always be your schoolgirl as long as you will be my mistress.”

THE END.