"From first to last it has been silly," she groaned. "It was perfectly
hateful of me to make Milly send her poetry and turn her into a
laughing-stock, even though no one knows it was she who wrote them, and
it was ridiculous for me to put that one in about Cousin Appolina. And
it isn't very funny, either. I might have made a better one while I was
about it. Oh dear! oh dear! I wish I hadn't been born a joker! I'll
never get to England now, not for years and years, for papa declares he
won't take me himself until I have finished school. And when he hears
about this, for, of course, Cousin Appolina will tell the whole family,
what _will_ he say! Oh, oh! Unfortunate wretch that I am!"

Thus Peggy. Millicent, in the mean time, across the street, was in a no
less unhappy frame of mind.

"What can it be?" said she to herself. "Cousin Appolina could not have
found out then about the slippers, for she seemed to be in a very
pleasant mood when she came to the poetry-table. What in the world made
her buy all the poems? She must have come upon one that she liked, or
one that she didn't like, that made her buy them all. Probably that she
didn't like, but which one, I wonder?"

But as I have said, they rang Miss Briggs's door-bell, punctual to the
moment. James, the melancholy footman, seemed even more solemn than
usual as he ushered them up the stairs to the door of Miss Briggs's
library.

"Miss Reid and Miss Margaret Reid," he announced, in a sepulchral voice,
and withdrew, leaving them to their fate.

Miss Briggs sat at her desk writing. She gave the girls a cold
good-morning, and motioned them to be seated. She continued to write,
and her quill pen travelled briskly across the page, scratching loudly.
Millicent's heart sank. The slippers were placed in reproachful
prominence upon the top of the desk. The poems were not to be seen.

After some minutes' silence, broken only by a deep-drawn sigh from
Milly, a warning cough from Peggy, and the scratching of the quill, Miss
Briggs turned in her chair and faced them. She removed the spectacles
which she had worn when writing, and raised her lorgnette. The girls
thought that no stern judge in the days of witchcraft could have
appeared more formidable. She scrutinized them piercingly, coldly,
judicially. Then she spoke.

"I have asked you to come to me, young ladies, that some small matters
may be cleared up. Who wrote that poetry?" It was not the slippers
entirely, then. It wa