Laura: with regard to her
troubles, she need not look to Pin for sympathy: if Pin talked such
gibberish at the hint of putting off an inquisitive old woman, what
would she--and not she alone--what would they all say to the tissue of
lies Laura had spun round Mr. Shepherd, a holy man, a clergyman, and a
personal friend of Mother's into the bargain? She could not blink the
fact that, did it come to their ears, they would call her in earnest,
what Pin had called her in her temper--bad and wicked. Home was, alas!
no longer the snug nest in which she was safe from the slings and
shanghais of the world.

And then there was another thing: did she stay at home, she would have
to re-live herself into the thousand and one gimcrack concerns, which
now, as set forth by Pin, so bored her: the colic Leppie had brought on
by eating unripe fruit; the fact that another of Sarah's teeth had
dropped out without extraneous aid. It was all very well for a week or
two, but, at the idea of shutting herself wholly up with such mopokes,
of cutting herself off from her present vital interests, Laura hastily
reconsidered her decision to leave school. No: badly as she had
suffered at her companions' hands, much as she dreaded returning, it
was at school she belonged. All her heart was there: in the doings of
her equals, the things that really mattered--who would be promoted, who
prefect, whose seat changed in the dining-hall.--Besides, could one who
had experienced the iron rule of Mr. Strachey, or Mrs. Gurley, ever be
content to go back and just form one of a family of children? She not,
at any rate!

Thus she lay, all day long, her hands clasped under her neck, a small
white speck on the great wave-lapped beach. She watched the surf break,
watched the waves creep up and hide the reef, watched the gulls vanish
in the sun-saturated blue overhead. Sometimes she rose to her elbow to
follow a ship just inside the horizon; and it pleased her to think that
this great boat was sailing off, with a load of lucky mortals, to some
unknown, fairer world, while she, a poor Cinderella, had to stop
behind--even though she knew it was only the English mail going on to
Sydney. Of Pin she preferred not to think; nor could she dwell with
equanimity on her late misfortunes at school and the trials that
awaited her on her reappearance; and since she HAD to think of
something, she fell into the habit of making up might-have-been, of
narrating to herself how things