oarder--from the school. Her crime was: she had taken half-a-sovereign
from the purse of one of her room-mates. When taxed with the theft, she
wept that she had not taken it for herself, but to buy a ring for Laura
Rambotham; and, with this admission on her lips, she passed out of
their lives, leaving Laura, her confederate, behind.--Yes, confederate;
for, in the minds of most, liar and thief were synonymous.

Laura had not cared two straws for Chinky; she found what the latter
had done, "mean and disgusting", and said so, stormily; but of course
was not believed. Usually too proud to defend herself, she here
returned to the charge again and again; for the hint of connivance had
touched her on the raw. But she strove in vain to prove her innocence:
she could not get her enemies to grasp the abysmal difference between
merely making up a story about people, and laying hands on others'
property; if she could do the one, she was capable of the other; and
her companions remained convinced that, if she had not actually had her
fingers in some one's purse, she had, by a love of jewellery, incited
Chinky to the theft. And so, after a time, Laura gave up the attempt
and suffered in silence; and it WAS suffering; for her schoolfellows
were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which
makes a woman's cruelty so hard to bear. Laura had to accustom herself
to hear every word she said doubted; to hear some one called to, before
her face, to attest her statements; to see her room-mates lock up their
purses under her very nose.

However, only three weeks had still to run till the Christmas holidays.
She drew twenty-one strokes on a sheet of paper, which she pinned to
the wall above her bed; and each morning she ran her pencil through a
fresh line. She was quite resolved to beg Mother not to send her back
to school: if she said she was not getting proper food, that would be
enough to put Mother up in arms.

The boxes were being fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed
among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the
two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to
come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks
she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the
Bay, where one of her aunts had a cottage.

The news was welcome to Laura: she had shrunk from the thought of
Mother's searching eye. And at the cottage there would be non