self--which, in conjunction with her aquiline nose and a certain
antique severity of deportment, caused her to be known amongst us girls
as _The Roman Matron_--would have been somewhat ruffled, and that
sentence of expulsion from those classic walls would have been promptly
pronounced and as promptly carried into effect.

Happily no such necessity had ever arisen; and now the Roman Matron lay
dead in the little corner room on the second floor, and had done with
pupils, and half yearly accounts, and antique deportment for ever.

In losing Miss Chinfeather I felt as though the corner-stone of my life
had been rent away. She was too cold, she was altogether too far removed
for me to regard her with love, or even with that modified feeling which
we call affection. But then no such demonstration was looked for by Miss
Chinfeather. It was a weakness above which she rose superior. But if my
child's love was a gift which she would have despised, she looked for
and claimed my obedience--the resignation of my will to hers, the
absorption of my individuality in her own, the gradual elimination from
my life of all its colour and freshness. She strove earnestly, and with
infinite patience, to change me from a dreamy, passionate child--a child
full of strange wild moods, capricious, and yet easily touched either
to laughter or tears--into a prim and elegant young lady, colourless and
formal, and of the most orthodox boarding-school pattern; and if she did
not quite succeed in the attempt, the fault, such as it was, must be set
down to my obstinate disposition and not to any lack of effort on the
part of Miss Chinfeather. And now this powerful influence had vanished
from my life, from the world itself, as swiftly and silently as a
snowflake in the sun. The grasp of the hard but not unkindly hand, that
had held me so firmly in the narrow groove in which it wished me to
move, had been suddenly relaxed, and everything around me seemed
tottering to its fall. Three nights ago Miss Chinfeather had retired to
rest, as well, to all appearance, and as cheerful as ever she had been;
next morning she had been found dead in bed. This was what they told us
pupils; but so great was the awe in which I held the mistress of Park
Hill Seminary that I could not conceive of Death even as venturing to
behave disrespectfully towards her. I pictured him in my girlish fancy
as knocking at her chamber door in the middle of the night, and after
apologising for