aw her. You had so much to do, poor boy, just when she
was here. Her name was Laura--Laura Rambotham."

And Mrs. Shepherd gently: "Yes, a nice little girl. But very young for
her age. And SO shy."

"You wretched little lying sneak!"

In vain Laura wept and protested.

"You made me do it. I should never have told a word, if it hadn't been
for you."

This point of view enraged them. "What? You want to put it on us now,
do you? ... you dirty little skunk! To say WE made you tell that pack
of lies?--Look here: as long as you stay in this blooming shop, I'll
never open my mouth to you again!"

"Someone ought to tell old Gurley and have her expelled. That's all
she's fit for. Spreading disgusting stories about people who've been
kind to her. They probably only asked her there out of charity. She's
as poor as dirt."

"Wants her bottom smacked--that's what I say!"

Thus Maria, and, with her, Kate Horner.

Tilly was cooler and bitterer. "I was a dashed fool ever to believe a
word. I might have known her little game. She? Why, when I took her out
to see my cousin Bob, she couldn't say bo to a goose. He laughed about
her afterwards like anything; said she ought to have come in a
perambulator, with a nurse.--YOU make anyone in love with you--you!"
And Tilly spat, to show her disdain.

"What have they been saying to you, Laura?" whispered Chinky, pale and
frightened. "Whatever is the matter?"

"Mind your own business and go away," sobbed Laura.

"I am, I'm going," said Chinky humbly.--"Oh, Laura, I WISH you had that
ring."

"Oh, blow you and your ring! I hate the very name of it," cried Laura,
maddened.--And retreating to a lavatory, which was the only private
place in the school, she wept her full.

They all, every girl of them, understood white lies, and practised
them. They might also have forgiven her a lie of the good, plain,
straightforward, thumping order. What they could not forgive, or get
over, was the extraordinary circumstantiality of the fictions which
with she had gulled them: to be able to invent lies with such
proficiency meant that you had been born with a criminal bent.--And as
a criminal she was accordingly treated.

Even the grown-up girls heard a garbled version of the story.

"Whyever did you do it?" one of them asked Laura curiously; it was a
very pretty girl, called Evelyn, with twinkling brown eyes.

"I don't know," said Laura abjectly; and this was almost true.

"But I say! ... nasty