st Class, Second Class, and still no sign of the familiar number.
Third Class--it was not there! Rhoda gave a little gulp, and began
again from the very beginning. She had been too quick, too eager. It
was so easy to miss a number. One by one she conned them over, but it
was not there. The long Pass List lay below, and she looked at it with
dreary indifference. To scramble through with the rabble was a sorry
attainment, or it seemed so for one moment, but at the next it became,
suddenly, a wild, impossible dream, for--the number was not there! No
fear of overlooking this time, for the figures stood out as if printed
in fire, and burned themselves into her brain. The number was not in
the First Class, nor the Second, nor the Third; it was not in the Pass
List, it was not mentioned at all.

If she had ever permitted herself to anticipate such a situation, which
she had not, Rhoda would have pictured herself flying into a paroxysm of
despair; but in reality she felt icy cold, and it was in a tone almost
of indifference that she announced:

"I am plucked! I have not passed at all."

"Never mind, dear; you did your best, and the work matters more than the
result. Very uncertain tests, these examinations--I never cared about
them," said her father kindly, and Mrs Chester smiled in her usual
placid fashion, and murmured, "Oh, I expect it's a mistake. It's so
easy to make a mistake in printing figures. You will find it is all
right, darling, later on. Have some jam!"

They were absolutely placid; absolutely calm; absolutely unconscious of
the storm of emotion raging beneath that quiet exterior; but Harold
glanced at his sister with the handsome eyes which looked so sleepy, but
which were in reality so remarkably wide-awake, and said slowly:

"I think Rhoda has finished, mother. You don't want any jam, do you,
Ro? Come into the garden with me instead. I want a stroll."

He walked out through the French window, and Rhoda followed with much
the same feeling of relief as that with which a captive escapes from the
prison which seems to be on the point of suffocating him, mentally and
physically. Brother and sister paced in silence down the path leading
to the rose garden. Harold was full of sympathy, but, man-like, found
it difficult to put his thoughts into words, and Rhoda, after all, was
the first to speak. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the path, and
confronted him with shining eyes. Her voice sou