--so much
tamer than we were at Miss Burridge's--where I was not a black
sheep--May will tell you if you care to ask her," protested Rose with
wounded feeling. "But I am so tired of the rosy and snowy cottages and
the ruins, and of that long-nosed collie. Sometimes I feel as if I would
give the world for him to wag his tail one day, just to give me an
excuse for crying out and flinging my india-rubber at him. I wish May
saw him; it might stop her ecstasies over her new acquisition--the brute
at home. I feel that this other brute, and the rest of the Misses
Stone's copies and models, are injuring my drawing--I know they are
making it cramped; while the scrolls help my freedom of touch like
Hogarth's line of beauty or Giotto's O. And it is such humbug, and so
horrid to have to swallow these doses of _sel-volatile_--a great healthy
girl like me!"

"Humph!" said Hester again, "I hope you may not repent what you have
done--if so, you need not blame me."

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OLD TOWN, WITH ITS AIR STAGNANT YET TROUBLED. IS MAY TO BECOME A
SCHOLAR OR A SHOP-GIRL?

The spring found Redcross still staggering under the failure of Carey's
Bank. Hardly a week passed yet without some painful result of the
disaster coming to light. These results had ceased to startle, there had
been so many of them; but they still held plenty of interest for the
fellow-sufferers, and Dora and May's letters were full of the details.

Bell Hewett had left Miss Burridge's; she had got a situation, or
rather, she had been appointed to a junior form in the Girls' Day School
at Deweshurst, going in the morning and returning in the afternoon by
train. It was a good thing for Bell on the whole. She was more
independent, had a recognized position as a public school-mistress,
which she would not have had as a private governess; and if she
continued to study, and passed various examinations, she might rise to
higher and higher forms until she blossomed into a head-mistress--fancy
Bell a head-mistress! She had quite a handsome salary, more than poor
Ned's according to the chroniclers, Dora and May. That was the bright
side of it. Unluckily for Bell, as most people thought, there was
another. The daily journeys, together with the school-work, constituted
a heavy task for a girl. Bell, toiling up from the railway station on a
rainy day, with her umbrella ready to turn inside out, and her
waterproof flying open, because her left hand, cramped and numb,