Easter."

"Yes, and find I'm not a prefect. A nice tale she'll be told about it
all, I expect. I'd write to her, but she hasn't answered my two last
letters."

"Well, you see, the doctor said she wasn't to be worried about any
school matters, and it would get rather stiff answering letters if
everybody wrote to her, wouldn't it?"

"Right you are, O Queen! I stand rebuked."

Though her friends in the Sixth, and indeed most of the girls, might
thoroughly sympathize with Lesbia, her deposition from the prefectship
had an unfortunate effect upon those forms to which she acted as
assistant mistress. Discipline had always been her weak point, and the
children seemed to wax more unruly than ever. Whether they believed her
guilty or innocent of the crime laid to her charge they realized she was
degraded from office, and therefore considered she might be defied with
impunity. Many were the weary tussles she had in her classes. She dared
not appeal to Miss Ormerod, and was obliged to struggle along as best
she could, fighting against the continual "ragging" to which she was
subjected, and sometimes wishing all juniors were at the bottom of the
sea.

She began to dread the hours when she must take command in IIIB. The
girls there were a particularly turbulent crew, and experts in heckling
their inexperienced young teacher. They particularly loved to "prove her
with hard questions", and as she was not a modern Solomon she could
rarely find satisfactory answers for these youthful "Queens of Sheba".
It made her terribly nervous to be asked to settle startling by-problems
of the lesson, especially when she guessed they were put on purpose to
puzzle her. She would try desperately to evade them.

"That's nothing to do with what we're learning," she would say airily.

"But Miss Ormerod likes us to think things out," some determined
conscientious objector would reply, "and, of course, we want to know
exactly."

"Miss Ormerod says it's part of the lesson to ask questions," would pipe
another child.

Then the whole form would gaze at poor Lesbia till she writhed under the
combined stare, horribly conscious of her own ignorance and her poor
qualifications for her task as teacher, and wondering how to hide her
lack of general knowledge from her fifteen persecutors.

First and foremost among the rebels was Maisie Martin. She was quick of
brain, agile in invention, and easily led the rest. During the last
weeks of term she became t