r, with my very gravest displeasure. In this school
I have always endeavored to inculcate the true principles of honor and of
trust. I have laid down certain broad rules, and expect them to be
obeyed; but I have never hampered you with petty and humiliating
restraints. I have given you a certain freedom, which I believed to be
for your best good, and I have never suspected one of you until you have
given me due cause.

"Now, however, I tell you plainly that I alter all my tactics. One girl
sitting in this room is guilty. For her sake I shall treat you all as
guilty, and punish you accordingly. For the remainder of this term, or
until the hour when the guilty girl chooses to release her companions,
you are all, with the exception of the little children and Miss Russell,
who can scarcely have played this trick on herself, under punishment. I
withdraw your half-holidays, I take from you the use of the south parlor
for your acting, and every drawing-room in the play-room is confiscated.
But this is not all that I do. In taking from you my trust, I must treat
you as untrustworthy--you will no longer enjoy the liberty you used to
delight in--everywhere you will be watched. A teacher will sit in your
play-room with you, a teacher will accompany you into the grounds, and I
tell you plainly, girls, that chance words and phrases which drop from
your lips shall be taken up, and used, if necessary, to the elucidation
of this disgraceful mystery."

Here Mrs. Willis left the room, and the teachers desired the several
girls in their classes to attend to their morning studies.

Nothing could exceed the dismay which her words had produced. The
innocent girls were fairly stunned, and from that hour for many a day all
sunshine and happiness seemed really to have left Lavender House.

The two, however, who felt the change most acutely, and on whose altered
faces their companions began to fix suspicious eyes, were Annie Forest
and Hester Thornton. Hester was burdened with an intolerable sense of the
shameful falsehood she had told; Annie, guilty in another matter,
succumbed at last utterly to a sense of misery and injustice. Her
orphaned and lonely position for the first time began to tell on her; she
ate little and slept little, her face grew very pale and thin, and her
health really suffered.

All the routine of happy life at Lavender House was changed. In the large
play-room the drawing-rooms were unused; there were no pleasant littl