pult at the beautiful white
statue-lady, till the Venus--if that is her name, which I doubt--was all
over black spots, like a Dalmation or carriage dog.

Then she went into her class room and arranged tintacks, with the
business end up, on all the desks and seats, an act fraught with gloomy
returns to Blossoma Rand and Wilhelmina Marguerite Asterisk. Another
booby-trap--a dictionary, a pot of water, three pieces of chalk, and a
handful of torn paper--was hastily sketched above the door. Three other
little girls looked on in open-mouthed appreciation. I do not wish to
shock you, so I will not tell you about the complete success of the
booby-trap, nor of the bloodthirsty fight between Lucy and Bertha
Kaurter in a secluded fives-court during rec. Dora Spielman and Gertrude
Rook were agitated seconds. It was Lucy's form mistress, the adored Miss
Harter Larke, who interrupted the fight at the fifth round, and led the
blood-stained culprits into the hall and up the beautiful picture-like
steps to the Headmistress's room.

The Head of the Blackheath High School has all the subtle generalship of
the Head in Mr. Kipling's 'Stalky.' She has also a manner which subdues
parents and children alike to 'what she works in, like the dyer's hand.'
Anyone less clever would have expelled the luckless Lucy--saddled with
her brother's boy-nature--on such evidence as was now brought forward.
Not so the Blackheath Head. She reserved judgment, the most terrible of
all things for a culprit, by the way, who thought it over for an hour
and a half in the mistress's room, and she privately wrote a note to
Lucy's mother, gently hinting that Lucy was not quite herself: might be
sickening for something. Perhaps she had better be kept at home for a
day or two. Lucy went home, and on the way upset a bicycle with a little
girl on it, and came off best in a heated physical argument with a
baker's boy.

Harry, meanwhile, had dried his tears, and gone to school. He knew his
lessons, which was a strange and pleasing thing, and roused in his
master hopes destined to be firmly and thoroughly crushed in the near
future. But when he had emerged triumphantly from morning school he
suddenly found his head being punched by Simpkins Minor, on the ground
that he, Harry, had been showing off. The punching was scientific and
irresistible. Harry, indeed, did not try to resist; in floods of tears
and with uncontrolled emotion he implored Simpkins Minor to let him
alone