prematurely
old face and starved flat body, the pretty little girl hanging down
her head and weeping, the smaller child who gave him one black defiant
look and then gazed past him out of the window.

"Well, Miss Miller--?" he asked.

"I've brought you a case that I don't know what to do with," she
began. "This is Judith Marshall, in the third grade, and she has just
done one of the naughtiest things I ever heard of--"

When she had finished her recital, "How do you know this child did
it?" asked Mr. Bristol, always his first question in cases between
teachers and pupils.

"She was so brazen as to come right back and tell us so," said Miss
Miller, her tone growing more and more condemnatory.

Judith's face, capable of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut
down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked
at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm
crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls. "And
what has this little girl to do with anything?" he asked.

"This is Sylvia Marshall, Judith's sister, and of course she feels
dreadfully about Judith's doing such a dreadful thing," explained Miss
Miller inelegantly.

Mr. Bristol walked back to his desk and sat down. "Well, I think I
needn't keep you any longer, Miss Miller," he said. "If you will just
leave the little girls here for a while perhaps I can decide what to
do about it."

Thus mildly but unmistakably dismissed, the teacher took her
departure, pushing Sylvia and Judith inside the door and shutting it
audibly after her. She was so tired as she walked down the stairs that
she ached, and she thought to herself, "As if things weren't hard
enough without their going and being naughty--!"

Inside the room there was a moment's silence, filled almost palpably
by Sylvia's quivering alarm, and by Judith's bitter mental resistance.
Mr. Bristol drew out a big book from the shelf over his desk and held
it out to Sylvia. "I guess you all got pretty excited about this,
didn't you?" he said, smiling wisely at the child. "You and your
sister sit down and look at the pictures in this for a while, till you
get cooled off, and then I'll hear all about it."

Sylvia took the book obediently, and drew Judith to a chair, opening
the pages, brushing away her tears, and trying to go through the form
of looking at the illustrations, which were of the birds native to the
region. In spite of her emotion, the large,