ry Room. You may tell Miss
Garside that I am disengaged now, and at liberty to speak to her."

Winona left the study with very different feelings from those with which
she had entered. Her spirits were so high that she wanted to dance along
the corridor. She could hardly believe her good fortune. Those great and
important gentlemen, the Governors, had actually approved of her essay
to the extent of allowing it to stand as her qualification for the
Scholarship! She blessed Lady Jane Grey, and Edgar Allan Poe, and
Browning, and Andre de Chenier, and the happy chance that had made her
combine them all. She was glad she had paid that visit to Hampton Court,
and that she had seen Lady Jane Grey's portrait, and had been able to
describe both. Life was going to be a very exhilarating business, now
her position in the school was once more secure.

"I'll show them how I can work," she thought. "They shan't be sorry that
they let me stay after all! Oh, I am in luck! Yes, I'm the luckiest girl
in the school!"

CHAPTER VII

An Autumn Foray

Winona felt that she now started life at the High School on an entirely
new basis. Miss Bishop and Miss Huntley understood her limitations and
judged her accordingly. It was not by any means that they lowered their
standard, but that they appreciated her difficulty in keeping up with
the Form and gave her credit for her hard work. And hard work it
undoubtedly was. She would get up early in the morning to revise her
lessons before breakfast, and would sit toiling over books and exercises
in the evenings till even Aunt Harriet--indefatigable worker
herself--would tell her to stop, and wax moral on the folly of burning
the candle at both ends. The coaching from Miss Lever was of inestimable
value. It supplied just the gaps in which she was deficient, and gave
her an adequate grasp of her three toughest subjects. Slowly she began
to make headway, she saw light in mathematical problems that had before
been meaningless formulae, chemistry was less of a hopeless tangle, and
Vergil's lines construed into understandable sentences instead of utter
nonsense. It was only gradual progress, however. She had much ground to
cover before she caught up the Form. She was plodding, but not a
brilliant all-round scholar like Garnet. The fact was that Winona was
only clever in one direction: in the realm of imagination her mind ran
like a racehorse, but harnessed to heavy intellectual burdens it proved