to open your mouth."--Mother was very cross.

"I didn't want to see that old frump anyhow," retorted Laura, who
inclined to charge the inhabitants of the township with an extreme
provinciality. "And what else was there to say, but yes or no? She
asked me all things I didn't know anything about. You don't want me to
tell stories, I suppose?"

"Well, if a child of mine doesn't know the difference between being
polite and telling stories," said Mother, completely outraged, "then,
all I can say is, it's a ... a great shame!" she wound up lamely, after
the fashion of hot-tempered people who begin a sentence without being
clear how they are going to end it.--"You were a nice enough child
once. If only I'd never let you leave home."

This jeremiad was repeated by Mother and chorused by the rest till
Laura grew incensed. She was roused to defend her present self, at the
cost of her past perfections; and this gave rise to new dissensions.

So that in spite of what she had to face at school, she was not
altogether sorry, when the time came, to turn her back on her unknowing
and hence unsympathetic relations. She journeyed to Melbourne on one of
those pleasant winter days when the sun shines from morning till night
in a cloudless sky, and the chief mark of the season is the
extraordinary greenness of the grass; returned a pale, determined,
lanky girl, full of the grimmest resolutions.

The first few days were like a bad dream. The absence of Evelyn came
home to her in all its crushing force. A gap yawned drearily where
Evelyn had been--but then, she had been everywhere. There was now a
kind of emptiness about the great school--except for memories, which
cropped up at each turn. Laura was in a strange room, with strange,
indifferent girls; and for a time she felt as lonely as she had done in
those unthinkable days when she was still the poor little green "new
chum".

Her companions were not wilfully unkind to her--her last extravagance
had been foolish, not criminal--and two or three were even sorry for
the woebegone figure she cut. But her idolatrous attachment to Evelyn
had been the means of again drawing round her one of those magic
circles, which held her schoolfellows at a distance. And the aroma of
her eccentricity still clung to her. The members of her class were deep
in study, too; little was now thought or spoken of but the approaching
examinations. And her first grief over, Laura set her teeth and flung
herself on