r aunt. So she sat
at lunch time even shyer and more speechless than usual, and let the
ball of conversation persistently drop.

"Fretting for her brother, I suppose," thought Miss Beach. "She can talk
fast enough with friends of her own age. Well, I suppose an old body
like myself mustn't expect to be company for a girl of fifteen!"

She was too proud to let the hurt feeling show itself on her face,
however, and propping up the newspaper beside her plate, she plunged
into the latest accounts from the Front.

CHAPTER VI

A Crisis

Winona had been more than a month, nearly five weeks indeed, at the
Seaton High School. In the first few days of her introduction to
V.a. she had told herself that the difficulty of the work
consisted largely in its newness, and that as soon as she grew
accustomed to it she would sail along as swimmingly as Garnet Emerson,
or Olave Parry, or Hilda Langley, or Agatha James. Most unfortunately
she found her theory acted in the opposite direction. Closer
acquaintance with her Form subjects proved their extreme toughness. She
was not nearly up to the standard of the rest of the girls. Her Latin
grammar was shaky, her French only a trifle better, she had merely a
nodding acquaintance with geometry, and had not before studied
chemistry. Her teacher seemed to expect her to understand many things of
which she had hitherto never heard, and was apparently astounded at her
ignorance. Winona puzzled over her text-books during many hours of
preparation, but she made little headway. The royal road to learning,
which she had fondly hoped to tread, was proving itself a stony and
twisting path.

"_You_ seem to get on all right?" she said wistfully to Garnet one day.

"Why, yes. Of course one has to work," admitted her friend. "Miss
Huntley keeps one up to the mark. But one must expect that in
V.a. They don't put scholarship holders in the Preparatory."

"I was all at sea in math. this morning."

"You were rather a duffer, certainly. The problems weren't as difficult
as the ones they gave us in the entrance exam. If those didn't floor
you, why couldn't you work these?"

"But they did floor me. I barely managed half the paper. I reckoned I'd
failed in it."

Garnet looked surprised.

"Then your other subjects must have been extremely good to make up for
it. I was told that we should probably stand or fall by maths. You were
ripping in everything else, I suppose? Scored no end?"

Winona d