y hands! They'll never recover," said Dora,
spreading out her fingers.

"Very likely; but the children were not your slaves. You have a perfect
right to forbid them to enter your school except on certain conditions,
but not to tyrannise over them when there. You have done more harm than
you will undo in a hurry."

"I am afraid so," murmured Mary.

Dora had a temper, and answered angrily, "Well, I'm sure I did it for
the best."

"I don't approve of opinionative young ladies," said Edmund, who was
really from old habit quite like an elder brother.

"Oh, Dora," sighed Mary, "don't!"

Dora felt impelled to argue the matter out on the spot, but something in
Mary's look withheld her. She went away, stepping high and feeling
stately and proud; but when she had walked up and down her own room a
few times, her better sense began to revive, and she saw that she had
acted in anger and self-will quite as much as from a sense of propriety,
and she threw herself on her bed and shed some bitter tears.

They would have been still more bitter if she could have heard the
exclamations of the mothers over their gates that evening.

"Well, to be sure, that a young lady should have treated my poor like
that!"

"Her father says, says he, `I'll have the law of she.'"

"My Jenny, she come home looking like a poor mad woman. `Whatever has
thee been arter?' says I. `'Tis the lady,' says she."

"Lady! She ought to be ashamed on herself, a-making such Betties of the
poor children."

"Ah! didn't I tell you," gibed Tirzah, "what would come of making up to
the gentlefolk, with their soft words and such. They only want to have
their will of you, just like the blackamoors."

"You'll not find me a sending my Liz and Nan," cried Mrs Morris, "no,
not if her was to offer me a hundred goulden guineas."

"I don't let my gal go to be made into a guy!" was the general
sentiment; and Mrs Verdon, in her bed, intensified it by warning her
neighbours that the cropping their heads was "a preparation for sending
them out to them foreign parts where they has slaves."

And on Sunday, there were only ten of the female pupils at school, and
poor Dora and Sophia both cried all church time. They thought their
hasty measures had condemned their poor girls to be heathens and
good-for-nothings for ever and ever.

Tirzah Todd laughed at them all. The Todds had gipsy connections; Todd
himself was hardly ever visible. He was never chargeable to the