s, before six months had
run their course.

Closeted with parent and teachers, the girl received numberless lectures
on the dangers of a thoughtless and unstable character, and was moved to
ardent vows of repentance; but, alone with Maud, her confidante and
admirer, she was wont to cast a kindly glamour of romance over her own
delinquencies. "It's my heart," she would sigh pathetically. "My heart
is so sensitive. It's like an Aeolian harp, Maud, upon which every
passing breeze plays its melody. I'm a creature of sensibility!" And
she rolled her fine eyes to the ceiling, the while Maud snorted, being
afflicted with adenoids, and wrinkled her brows in the effort to put her
fingers on the weak spot in the argument, the which she felt, but had
difficulty in explaining.

"Your heart is hard enough at times!" she said at last. "I suppose the
strings get so thin with being everlastingly twanged that they break,
and then the breeze can moan as much as it likes without waking a sound.
When you let that poor little puppy lie for two days without any food,
for instance--"

"You're a beast!" retorted Dreda with fervour. "You don't understand.
No one does. I'm misunderstood all round. At any rate I'd rather reach
the hilltops sometimes than everlastingly crawl along in the mire, like
_some_ people I can mention. It's better to have soared and fallen than
never to have soared at all!"

Dreda, like most of us, was tender towards her own failings, and
resented the criticism of her peers. This afternoon she kept her eyes
glued upon the landscape, affecting to be ignorant of Gurth's sly hit,
and presently it was balm to her wounded spirit to be able to win the
game for herself and her partner, and with a squeal of triumph to point
to an upper window in a row of tenement houses, where two erect ears and
a pair of yellow eyes could be clearly discerned over the edge of a
wooden box filled with miniature fir trees of funereal aspect.

The game was over, and with it had disappeared all disposition to
quarrel. Henceforward, to the end of the journey, the four young people
chatted amicably together, discussing various subjects of interest, but
invariably returning to the one absorbing question of the hour--what
could have happened to account for the hasty and mysterious summons to
the solitary home in the country at a time when all their interests and
pleasures were centred in town?

CHAPTER TWO.

Mr and Mrs Saxon welc