m on the wings of her parrot-like memory; hence, at home
no one suspected that anything was amiss with her. The knowledge
weighed the more heavily on her own mind. And, as if her other troubles
were not enough, she was now beset by nervous fears about the future.
She saw chiefly rocks ahead. If she did not succeed in getting through
the final examination in summer, she would not be allowed to present
herself for matriculation, and, did this happen, there would be the
very devil to pay. All her schooling would, in Mother's eyes, have been
for naught. For Mother was one of those people who laid tremendous
weight on prizes and examinations, as offering a tangible proof that
your time had not been wasted or misspent. Besides this, she could not
afford in the event of a failure, to pay the school-fees for another
year. The money which, by hook and by crook, had been scraped together
and hoarded up for Laura's education was now coming to an end; as it
was, the next six months would mean a terrible pinching and screwing.
The other children, too, were growing day by day more costly; their
little minds and bodies clamoured for a larger share of attention. And
Laura's eyes were rudely opened to the struggle Mother had had to make
both ends meet, while her first-born was acquiring wisdom; for Mother
spoke of it herself, spoke openly of her means and resources, perhaps
with some idea of rousing in Laura a gratitude that had so far been
dormant.

If this was her intention she failed. Laura was much too fast entangled
in her own troubles, to have leisure for such a costly feeling as
gratitude; and Mother's outspokenness only added a fresh weight to her
pack. It seemed as if everybody and everything were ranged against her;
and guilty, careworn, lonely, she shrank into her shell. About school
affairs she again kept her lips shut, enduring, like a stubborn martyr,
the epithets "close" and "deceitful" this reticence earned her. Her
time was spent in writing endless, scrawly letters to Evelyn, which
covered days; in sitting moodily at the top of the fir tree which she
climbed in defiance of her length of petticoat glaring at sunsets, and
brooding on dead delights; in taking long, solitary, evening walks, by
choice on the heel of a thunderstorm, when the red earth was riddled by
creeklets of running water; till Mother, haunted by a lively fear of
encounters with "swags" or Chinamen, put her foot down and forbade them.

Sufferers are seld