vision, and the girls sat on chairs arranged in a
semicircle round their mistress. Cissie could not resist taking a peep
at her portrait, and handed it to her neighbour to admire, who passed it
on to the next girl, so that in course of time it found its way down the
class to Vera Clifford. Now Miss Rowe was rather handsome, but she
happened to have a scar down the side of her forehead, which slightly
spoilt her good looks. Patty had naturally left this out in her sketch,
but Vera, who had not the same nice feeling, took a pencil and, nudging
Muriel, who sat next to her, put in the mark, which showed only too
plainly across the brow.

"What are you doing? Pass it back at once!" whispered Cissie anxiously.

Her ill-judged concern, however, had the unfortunate effect of calling
Miss Rowe's attention to the piece of paper.

"What have you there, Vera?" she asked.

Vera tried to hand the sketch back quickly to Maud Greening, and Maud
made a valiant effort to slip it inside her Shakespeare; but as Maggie
Woodhall happened at that instant to jog her elbow, she dropped the
book, and the paper fluttered on to the floor, almost at the teacher's
feet. Miss Rowe picked it up and looked at it critically.

"To whom does this belong?" she enquired sharply.

"It's mine, Miss Rowe, please," said Cissie.

"Did you draw it?"

"No, Miss Rowe."

"Then who did?"

"Patty Hirst," said Cissie, who had not seen Vera's alteration, and
thought the portrait so flattering and talented that she saw no reason
for withholding the artist's name, and, indeed, considered Patty might
well be proud of such an achievement.

"Then I think Patty Hirst might employ her time more profitably," said
Miss Rowe, and, turning very pink, she tore the picture across, and
threw it into the waste-paper basket.

Cissie rescued the fragments afterwards, and pieced them together, and
when she discovered the addition which had been made, her wrath and
indignation knew no bounds. As for Patty, she was nearly heart-broken at
the affair. She genuinely liked Miss Rowe, and could not bear her to
think that she would have been so cruel and indelicate as to call
attention to her one blemish. Even Vera was penitent, for though she had
had the bad taste to alter the drawing, she certainly had not intended
it to fall into the hands of the mistress herself. The hard part of it
was that no one liked to explain, because to refer to it at all would
only have seemed to make