nd mixing and melting here and there in a yellowish
plash.

Margaret shivered. Then she heard the boudoir door open, and Janey came
out, making a plucky attempt not to cry.

"What is it?" whispered Margaret, forgetting the dread interview before
her, and her own unformed misgivings.

"She won't give me the letter. I'm to have it when I go home for good;
and I'm to go home for good at the holidays," whimpered Janey.

"Poor Janey!" said Margaret, petting the blonde head on her shoulder.

"Margaret Shields, come here!" cried Miss Marlett, in a shaky voice,
from the boudoir.

"Come to the back music-room when she's done with you," the other
girl whispered. And Margaret marched, with a beating heart, into Miss
Marlett's chamber.

"My dear Margaret!" said Miss Marlett, holding out her hands. She was
standing up in the middle of the boudoir. She ought to have been sitting
grimly, fortified behind her bureau; that was the position in which she
generally received pupils on these gloomy occasions.

"My dear Margaret!" she repeated. The girl trembled a little as the
school-mistress drew her closer, and made her sit down on a sofa.

"What has happened?" she asked. Her lips were so dry that she could
scarcely speak.

"You must make up your mind to be very brave. Your father----"

"Was it an accident?" asked Margaret, suddenly. She knew pretty well
what was coming. Often she had foreseen the end, which it needed no
prophet to foretell. "Was it anything very dreadful?"

"Mr. Maitland does not say. You are to be called for to-day. Poor
Daisy!"

"Oh, Miss Marlett, I am so very unhappy!" the girl sobbed. Somehow she
was kneeling now, with her head buried in the elder lady's lap. "I have
been horrid to you. I am so wretched!"

A little kindness and a sudden trouble had broken down Miss Margaret
Shields. For years she had been living, like Dr. Johnson at college,
with a sad and hungry heart, trying to "carry it off by her wild talk
and her wit." "It was bitterness they mistook for frolic." She had known
herself to be a kind of outcast, and she determined to hold her own with
the other girls who had homes and went to them in the holidays. Margaret
had not gone home for a year. She had learned much, working harder than
they knew; she had been in the "best set" among the pupils, by dint of
her cheery rebelliousness. Now she suddenly felt all her loneliness, and
knew, too, that she had been living, socially, in that little soc