les of the school as safely as an egg-dancer among his
eggs. For the simple reasons that temptations seemed to pass her by.
There was, besides, a kind of manly exactness in her habit of thinking
and speaking; and it was this trait her companions tried to symbolise,
in calling her by the initial letters of her name.

She and Laura, though classmates, had never drawn together. It is true,
Mary was sixteen, and, at that time of life, a couple of years dig a
wide breach. But there was also another reason. Once, in the innocence
of her heart, Laura had let the cat out of the bag that an uncle of
hers lived in the up-country township to which Mary belonged.

The girl had eyed her coldly, incredulously. "What? That dreadful man
your uncle?" she had exclaimed: she herself was the daughter of a
church dignitary. "I should say I did know him--by reputation at least.
And it's quite enough, thank you."

Now Laura had understood that Uncle Tom--he needed but a pair of gold
earrings to pose as the model for a Spanish Grandee--that Uncle Tom WAS
odd, in this way: he sometimes took more to drink than was good for
him; but she had never suspected him of being "dreadful", or a byword
in Wantabadgery. Colouring to the roots of her hair, she murmured
something about him of course not being recognised by the rest of the
family; but M. P., she was sure, had never looked on her with the same
eyes again.

Such was the rigid young moralist into whose hands her fate was given.

She sat and meditated these things, in spiritless fashion. She would
have to confess to her fabrications--that was plain. M. P.'s precise
mind would bring back a precise account of how matters stood in the
Shepherd household: not by an iota would the truth be swerved from.
Why, oh why, had she not foreseen this possibility? What evil spirit
had prompted her and led her on?--But, before her brain could
contemplate the awful necessity of rising and branding herself as a
liar, it sought desperately for a means of escape. For a wink, she even
nursed the idea of dragging in a sham man, under the pretence that Mr.
Shepherd had been but a blind, used by her to screen some one else. But
this yarn, twist it as she might, would not pass muster. Against it was
the mass of her accumulated detail.

She sat there, devising scheme after scheme. Not one of them would do.

When, at tea-time, she rose to wash her face before going downstairs,
the sole point on which she had come to