king for granted that they are trying
to shirk their duties and to cheat her.

Then came the inevitable tussle with the cabman as to the fare, during
which Kitty glanced about her at the people on the platform, picking out
with special interest those boys and girls who looked as though they
also were going to school, and expending on them a great amount of pity
which was probably in some cases quite wasted.

At last came the summons to "get in," and Kitty got into the musty old
cab beside her aunt, and they were started on the last stage of their
journey through rain-washed busy streets, where the people were hurrying
along under umbrellas, or in omnibuses and cabs. Now and then a cab
laden with luggage would lumber past them on its way to the station, and
Kitty's mind would follow the people inside it through a whole long
chapter of imaginary happenings until something else passed and
distracted her thoughts.

By-and-by they left the streets, and came to a quiet suburb, where road
after road, lined on either side with houses exactly like each other,
stretched in depressing monotony. To Kitty it looked the very acme of
correct, neat, yet hateful propriety, and her thoughts flew back
longingly to the dear old irregular wind-swept street of Gorlay, which
was to her then the most lovable and lovely spot on the face of the
earth. At last, when she was almost tired of speculating on the people
who lived in the houses they were passing, and of pitying them for being
condemned to such a fate, the jolting cab drew up before a corner house,
one of the primmest of all the houses in the dullest of all the roads
they had passed that afternoon, and Kitty saw a shining brass plate on
the rails at the foot of the tiny patch of trim garden, and on the brass
plate "Miss Pidsley."

That was all. And this was the place that was to be her home! It was
quite a small school to which she had been banished--a small private one
where a few girls "who needed particular attention and training received
the individual care they needed," as Aunt Pike carefully read out from
the prospectus, dealing poor Kitty thus the last and most crushing
insult.

If the outside of the house had been unlike home and Gorlay, the inside
was even more so; the extreme neatness, the absolute spotlessness of
everything, the bareness, the high, square, ugly rooms, each and all
weighed on Kitty's spirits with a fresh load of depression. At the
thought of being