auvette plaintively.

"Joking apart, Ray, where did you get that fountain pen?" asked
Morvyth.

Raymonde's eyes twinkled.

"Little flower, could I tell you that,
I'd tell you my heart's secret with it!"

she misquoted.

"But do tell me! I think you might!"

"The more you tease, the less you'll find out!"

The school bell put an end to the conversation, and the girls, with
straightened faces, marched to their places in the big lecture hall.
The Reverend T. W. Beasley had taken full command of the examinations,
and had introduced several innovations. On former occasions each Form
had sat and written in its own room, but now desks had been placed for
the whole school together, and were so arranged that the Forms sat
alternately, a junior being sandwiched between each senior. The girls
were hugely insulted. "He suspects we'll copy each other's papers!"
thought Raymonde, and flashed her indignation along to Aveline. She
did not speak, but her expressive glance drew forth a reproof from the
examiner. He cleared his throat.

"Any girl communicating either by speech or otherwise will be
dismissed from the room!" he announced freezingly.

After that, the girls scarcely dared to look up from their papers.
They studied their questions and wrote away, some fast and furiously,
and others with the desponding leisure of those having very little to
put down. Mr. Beasley sat upon the platform, toying with his
watch-chain, and keeping his eye upon the movements of the candidates.
Fauvette, finishing long before the others, ventured to raise her eyes
as high as his boots, and let them rest there, marvelling at the size
and thickness of the footgear, and congratulating herself that she
could wear number three.

The morning wore itself slowly away. When the school compared notes at
12.30, the girls agreed that they had never in their lives before been
given such an atrocious and detestable set of examination papers. The
Sixth had fared as badly as the Fifth or the juniors, and even
monitresses were loud in their complaints. Certain viva voces taken in
the afternoon confirmed their ill opinion of their examiner.

"He glares at one till one's frightened out of one's wits!"

"And he hurries so--one hasn't time to answer!"

"And he takes things in quite a different way from what Gibbie does."

"He's no need to be sarcastic!"

"Sarcastic, did you say? I call him downright rude!"

"He evidently d