single grey hair."

CHAPTER TWENTY.

AN ACCIDENT.

After a storm comes a calm. Compared with the struggle and anxiety of
the summer term, the one which followed seemed stagnation itself. The
arrival of the report had been an excitement, it is true; but when that
was over the days passed by in uneventful fashion, until autumn waned
and winter came back, with the attendant discomforts of dark mornings,
draughty corridors, and coatings of ice on the water in the ewers; for
this was a good, old-fashioned winter, when Jack Frost made his
appearance in the beginning of December, and settled down with a
solidity which meant that he had come to stay. The hardy girls declared
that it was "ripping," and laughed at the shivery subjects who hobbled
about on chilblained feet, and showed faces mottled blue and red, like
the imitation marble in lodging-house-parlours; the shivery girls
huddled in corners, and wished they could go to bed and hug hot bottles
until May came back and it was fit for human creatures to go about
again! People who possess brisk circulations can never understand the
sufferings of those whom no amount of clothing will keep warm, and who
perform their duties for four months in the year feeling as though icy
water were streaming down their backs. Human sympathy is an elastic
virtue, but it seems powerless to reach so far as that!

Poor Miss Everett belonged to this latter unhappy class, and perhaps the
hardest duty which she had to perform at Hurst Manor was the spending of
two hours daily in the grounds with her pupils, be the weather warm or
cold. To be sure, they always moved about briskly, playing hockey and
lacrosse so long as the weather allowed, and then turning to skating and
tobogganing, but there were moments of waiting and hanging about, when
the wind cut through her like a knife, and made her pretty face look
pinched to half its size. Rhoda, brisk and glowing, would look at her
with affectionate superiority, call her a "poor, dear, little frog," and
insist upon running races to restore circulation. Evie would declare
that she felt warmer after these exertions, but when at the expiration
of ten minutes she was found to be shivering and chattering as much as
ever, Rhoda would grow anxious, and consequently more flattering in her
similes.

"You are a hot-house flower, and not fit to rough it like this! It
makes me cold to look at you. I have a great mind to tell Miss Bruce
how you su