er last remark must have been audible over half the gymnasium.
Nellie nudged her so violently that her piece of chocolate fell to the
floor. In turning to recover it she noticed the cause of the sudden
interruption. Miss Janet was within a few yards of them turning over
some music by the piano.

Vivien's complexion assumed a dull beetroot shade. She wondered whether
Miss Janet had overheard. It was impossible to go up to her and explain
that they were only pretending. The mistress's face was inscrutable. She
did not even glance in their direction, but picked out two or three
songs from the pile and walked away into the house. The little circle
broke up. Miss Janet's vicinity seemed to have put the stopper on
romance. She was certainly not a sentimental person.

On the following day there was a fog--one of those white sea-fogs which
sometimes enveloped Porthkeverne, when everything was veiled in soft
mist, and even the very furniture was clammy. Vivien, whose throat was
delicate, came to school with a Shetland shawl across her mouth. She sat
and coughed in the gymnasium during recreation, and fingered a letter in
her pocket. It was quite a fat letter, and addressed to "Jack Stanley,
Esq".

"If it weren't so damp I'd run down the garden and post this," she said
to Lorraine. "I expect there'll be one waiting for me in the tree, but I
promised Mother I wouldn't do anything silly, and I suppose it _would_
be silly to run down the wet garden in my thin shoes and without my
coat."

"It would be absolutely cracked, with that cough. I'll go. Give me your
letter."

It was part of the procedure of the romance that the correspondence
must be deposited inside the hollow tree, or else, on wet days, it would
certainly have been far simpler to hand over the notes in school. Vivien
had once hinted this, but Patsie stuck firmly to her plans, and, as she
was the originator of the whole scheme, she had the right to make the
arrangements.

"'Jack's' letters will be found in the garden, and nowhere else," she
decreed.

So Lorraine, who was sufficiently interested to want to hear the next
instalment supplied by Patsie's fertile imagination, ran out into the
fog and among the dripping bushes down the path that edged the lawn. The
pillar-box was moist and earwiggy; she wetted and soiled her sleeve by
reaching down into it. At the bottom, in company with a fat spider and
several woodlice, lay a letter addressed in a bold hand to "My
Fo