f water on the skull of the
tortured criminal. She was very tired of all the Hyde-Lodge lessons and
accomplishments, the irregular French verbs--the "braires" and
"traires" which were so difficult to remember, and which nobody ever
could want to use in polite conversation; the ruined castles and
dilapidated windmills, the perpetual stumpy pieces of fallen timber and
jagged posts, executed with a BBB pencil; the chalky expanse of sky,
with that inevitable flight of crows scudding across it:--why must
there be always crows scudding across a drawing-master's sky, and why
so many jagged posts in a drawing-master's ideal of rural beauty?
Charlotte was inexpressibly weary of all the stereotyped studies; but
she liked Hyde Lodge better than the gothic villa. She liked the
friendly schoolfellows with their loud talk and boisterous manners, the
girls who called her "Halliday," and who were always borrowing her
reels of crochet-cotton and her pencils, her collars and
pocket-handkerchiefs. She liked the free-and-easy schoolgirl talk
better than her mother's tame discourse; she preferred the homely
litter of the spacious schoolroom to the prim splendours of Georgy's
state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a
hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at
Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with
an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of
colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip
Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the
mysteries and complications of the Stock Exchange.

On this bright June afternoon other girls were chattering gaily about
the fun of the breaking-up ball and the coming delights of the
holidays, but Charlotte sighed when they reminded her that the end of
her last half was close at hand.

She sat under a group of trees on the lawn, with a crochet antimacassar
lying in her lap, and with her friend and favourite, Diana Paget,
sitting by her side.

Hyde Lodge was that very establishment over which Priscilla Paget had
reigned supreme for the last seventeen years of her life, and among all
the pupils in a school of some forty or fifty girls, Diana was the one
whom Charlotte Halliday had chosen for her dearest companion and
confidante, clinging to her with a constancy not to be shaken by
ill-fortune or absence. The girl knew very well that Diana Paget was a
poor