h them during play-hours; she
never read the letters they received, and only superintended the specimen
home letter which each girl was required to write once a month. Other
head-mistresses wondered at the latitude she allowed her girls, but she
invariably replied:

"I always find it works best to trust them. If a girl is found to be
utterly untrustworthy, I don't expel her, but I request her parents to
remove her to a more strict school."

Mrs. Willis also believed much in that quiet half-hour each evening, when
the girls who cared to come could talk to her alone. On these occasions
she always dropped the school-mistress and adopted the _role_ of the
mother. With a very refractory pupil she spoke in the tenderest tones of
remonstrance and affection at these times. If her words failed--if the
discipline of the day and the gentle sympathy of these moments at night
did not effect their purpose, she had yet another expedient--the vicar
was asked to see the girl who would not yield to this motherly influence.

Mr. Everard had very seldom taken Mrs. Willis' place. As he said to her:
"Your influence must be the mainspring. At supreme moments I will help
you with personal influence, but otherwise, except for my nightly prayers
with your girls, and my weekly class, and the teachings which they with
others hear from my lips Sunday after Sunday, they had better look to
you."

The girls knew this rule well, and the one or two rare instances in the
school history where the vicar had stepped in to interfere, were spoken
of with bated breath and with intense awe.

Mrs. Willis had a great idea of bringing as much happiness as possible
into young lives. It was with this idea that she had the quaint little
compartments railed off in the play-room.

"For the elder girls," she would say, "there is no pleasure so great as
having, however small the spot, a little liberty hall of their own. In
her compartment each girl is absolute monarch. No one can enter inside
the little curtained rail without her permission. Here she can show her
individual taste, her individual ideas. Here she can keep her most prized
possessions. In short, her compartment in the play-room is a little home
to her."

The play-room, large as it was, admitted of only twenty compartments;
these compartments were not easily won. No amount of cleverness attained
them; they were altogether dependent on conduct. No girl could be the
honorable owner of her own little dra