to hit upon a suitable idea! Dreda chewed the
end of her pen, wrote "Synopsis of Plot" at the top of her paper in an
imposing round hand with the downstrokes elaborately inked, dotted
wandering designs here and there, and cudgelled her brains for
inspiration. There must be a girl, of course--a girl heroine, blonde
and lovely, and an adventuress (brunette), and a hero. But she did not
intend to write a love story--that was piffle. Something _really_
thrilling and dangerous! She mentally ran over a list of
misadventures--fire, flood, shipwreck. She had read of them all dozens
of times over; and, mentioned in a synopsis, they would have quite an
ordinary effect. It was after hours of anxious deliberation, during
which ordinary lessons went completely to the wall, that the brilliant
idea of an earthquake flashed upon Dreda's mind. An earthquake story
might be as complicated as one pleased, for all the superfluous people
could be killed off at the crucial moment, while legal papers and wills
could disappear, so that one could not even be expected to unravel the
mystery! She hovered uncertainly between three sensational titles--"A
Hopeless Quest," "For Ever Hidden," "In the Twinkling of an Eye!"--and
plunged boldly into the first sentence of the synopsis without having
the faintest idea how it should end:

"A lovely young girl, Leila (English, yellow hair, sixteen) lives on a
beautiful isle which had been a volcano hundreds of years before. (This
will not be mentioned till the last, but mysterious remarks made about
rumblings, to prepare the mind.) Dolores (Spanish), aged seventeen,
pretends to be her friend, but is really jealous. They stay together at
a country house with a veranda, and exciting things happen. Leila is
supposed to be an orphan, and Dolores patronises her because she is
poor. An English officer comes to call, and staggers back at sight of
Leila. (He is really her father.) Dolores makes mischief, and
persuades him to leave her all his money. They go to the lawyers, and
Leila goes out for a sail in a boat to cheer her spirits. While she is
sailing, the volcano blows up and everyone is killed. Leila is picked
up by a passing ship, and inherits the money."

Compared with this sensational programme, Susan's story promised to be
deplorably tame and uneventful, and Dreda curled her lip in scorn as she
read the neatly written lines:

"I want to write the story of a man who was naturally very ner