eye to eye with her comrades--if she had only known how
to do it. For there was no saying where it might lead you, if you
persisted in having odd and peculiar notions; you might even end by
being wicked yourself. Let her take a lesson in time from Annie's fate.
For, beginning perhaps with ideas that were no more unlike those of her
schoolfellows than were Laura's own, Annie was now a branded thief and
an outcast.--And the child's feelings, as she stood at the window, were
not very far removed from prayer. Had they found words, they would have
taken the form of an entreaty that she might be preserved from having
thoughts that were different from other people's; that she might be
made to feel as she ought to feel, in a proper, ladylike way--and
especially did she see a companion convicted of crime.

Below all this, in subconscious depths, a chord of fear seemed to have
been struck in her as well--the fear of stony faces, drooped lids, and
stretched, pointing fingers. For that night she started up, with a cry,
from dreaming that not Annie Johns but she was being expelled; that an
army of spear-like first fingers was marching towards her, and that,
try as she would, she could not get her limp, heavy legs to bear her to
the schoolroom door.

And this dream often returned.

XIII.

ON her honourable promotion the following Christmas--she mounted two
forms this time--Laura was a thin, middle-sized girl of thirteen, who
still did not look her age. The curls had vanished. In their place hung
a long, dark plait, which she bound by choice with a red ribbon.

Tilly was the only one of her intimates who skipped a class with her;
hence she was thrown more exclusively than before on Tilly's
companionship; for it was a melancholy fact: if you were not in the
same class as the girl who was your friend, your interests and hers
were soon fatally sundered. On their former companions, Tilly and
Laura, from their new perch, could not but look down: the two had
masters now for all subjects; Euclid loomed large; Latin was no longer
bounded by the First Principia; and they fussed considerably, in the
others' hearing, over the difficulties of the little blue books that
began: GALLIA EST OMNIS DIVISA IN PARTES TRES.

In the beginning, they held very close together; for their new fellows
were inclined to stand on their dignity with the pair of interlopers
from Class Two. They were all older than Tilly and Laura, and thought
themselve