e mean." She poked three fingers
through the toe of her stocking. "Veux dire, veux dire--Qu'est-ce-que
vous me racontez la?" scolded Mademoiselle. Miriam envied her air of
authority.

"Ah-ho! La-la--Boum--Bong!" came Gertrude's great voice from the door.

"Taisez-vous, taisez-vous, Jair-trude," rebuked Mademoiselle.

"How dare she?" thought Miriam, with a picture before her eyes of the
little grey-gowned thing with the wistful, frugal mouth and nose.

"Na--Miss Henderson?"

It was Fraulein's voice from within the little room. Minna was holding
the door open.

15

At the end of twenty minutes, dismissed by Fraulein with a smiling
recommendation to go and practise in the saal, Miriam had run upstairs
for her music.

"It's all right. I'm all right. I shall be able to do it," she said to
herself as she ran. The ordeal was past. She was, she had learned, to
talk English with the German girls, at table, during walks, whenever she
found herself with them, excepting on Saturdays and Sundays--and she was
to read with the four--for an hour, three times a week. There had been
no mention of grammar or study in any sense she understood.

She had had a moment of tremor when Fraulein had said in her slow clear
English, "I leave you to your pupils, Miss Henderson," and with that had
gone out and shut the door. The moment she had dreaded had come. This
was Germany. There was no escape. Her desperate eyes caught sight of a
solid-looking volume on the table, bound in brilliant blue cloth. She
got it into her shaking hands. It was "Misunderstood." She felt she
could have shouted in her relief. A treatise on the Morse code would
not have surprised her. She had heard that such things were studied at
school abroad and that German children knew the names and, worse than
that, the meaning of the names of the streets in the city of London. But
this book that she and Harriett had banished and wanted to burn in their
early teens together with "Sandford and Merton."...

"You are reading 'Misunderstood'?" she faltered, glancing at the four
politely waiting girls.

It was Minna who answered her in her husky, eager voice.

"D'ja, d'ja," she responded, "na, ich meine, _yace, yace_ we read--so
sweet and beautiful book--not?"

"Oh," said Miriam, "yes..." and then eagerly, "you all like it, do you?"

Clara and Elsa agreed unenthusiastically. Emma, at her elbow, made a
little despairing gesture, "I can't English," she moaned gently,