rstood that no signs could transmit
what she had been through, since seeing her friends last.

In the thick of this message she was, unluckily, caught by Dr Pughson,
who, after dealing her one of his butcherly gibes, bade her to the
blackboard, to grapple with the Seventh Proposition.

The remainder of the forenoon was a tussle with lessons not glanced at
since Friday night.--Besides, Laura seldom forestalled events by
thinking over them, choosing rather to trust for inspiration to the
spur of the moment.

Morning school at an end, she was laid hands on and hurried off to a
retired corner of the garden. Here, four friends squatted round,
determined to extract her adventures from her--to the last pip.

Laura was in a pretty pickle. Did she tell the plain truth, state the
pedestrian facts--and this she would have been capable of doing with
some address; for she had looked through her hosts with a perspicacity
uncommon in a girl of her age; had once again put to good use those
'sharp, unkind eyes' which Mother deplored. She had seen an overworked,
underfed man, who nagged like any woman, and made slaves of two weak,
adoring ladies; and she very well knew that, as often as her thoughts
in future alighted on Mr. Robby, she would think of him pinching and
screwing, with a hawk-like eye on a shadowy bishopric. Of her warm
feelings for him, genuine or imaginary, not a speck remained. The first
touch of reality had sunk them below her ken, just as a drop of cold
water sinks the floating grounds in a coffee-pot ... But did she
confess this, confess also that, save for a handful of monosyllables,
her only exchange of words with him had been a line of Virgil; and,
still more humbling, that she had liked his wife and sister better than
himself: did this come to light, she would forfeit every sou of the
prestige the visit had lent and yet promised to lend her. And, now that
the possible moment for parting with this borrowed support had come,
she recognised how greatly she had built on it.

These thoughts whizzed through her mind, as she darted a look at the
four predatory faces that hemmed her in. Tilly's was one of them: the
lightly mocking smile sat on it that Laura had come to know so well,
since her maladroit handling of Bob. She would kill that smile--and if
she had to die for it herself.

Still, she must be cautious, wary in picking her steps. Especially as
she had not the ghost of an idea how to begin.

Meanwhile cries