r Bible to.

"S'help me God, she is," asserted Maria.--"Look out, don't set the
place on fire."

"How do you know? ... who told you?"

"M. P. herself--Gosh, but you are a jealous little cub. Oh, go on,
Kiddy, don't take it like that. I guess he won't give you away."--For
Laura was as pale as a moment before she had been scarlet.

Alleging a violent headache, she mounted to her room, and sat down on
her bed. She felt stunned, and it took her some time to recover her
wits. Sitting on the extreme edge of the bedstead, she stared at
[P.181] the objects in the room without seeing them. "M. P.'s going
there on Saturday ... M. P.'s going there on Saturday," she repeated
stupidly, and, with her hands pressed on her hips, rocked herself to
and fro, after the fashion of an older woman in pain.

The fact was too appalling to be faced; her mind postponed it. Instead,
she saw the fifty-five at Sunday school--where they were at this
minute--drawn up in a line round the walls of the dining-hall. She saw
them rise to wail out the hymn; saw Mr. Strachey on his chair in the
middle of the floor, perpetually nimming with his left leg. And, as she
pictured the familiar scene to herself, she shivered with a sudden
sense of isolation: behind each well-known face lurked a possible enemy.

If it had only not been M. P.!--that was the first thought that
crystallised. Anyone else! ... from any of the rest she might have
hoped for some mercy. But Mary Pidwall was one of those people--there
were plenty such--before whom a nature like Laura's was inclined, at
the best of times, to shrink away, keenly aware of its own paltriness
and ineffectualness. Mary was rectitude in person: and it cannot be
denied that, to Laura, this was synonymous with hard, narrow,
ungracious. Not quite a prig, though: there was fun in Mary, and life
in her; but it was neither fun nor vivacity of a kind that Laura could
feel at ease with. Such capers as the elder girl cut were only
skin-deep; they were on the surface of her character, had no real roots
in her: just as the pieces of music she played on the piano were
accidents of the moment, without deeper significance. To Mary, life was
already serious, full of duties. She knew just what she wanted, too,
where she wanted to go and how to get there; her plans were cut and
dried. She was clever, very industrious, the head of several of her
classes. Nor was she ever in conflict with the authorities: she moved
among the ru