d into her face earnestly
when she took leave of her. "I shall hear of you again," she said,
"and I pray God it may be good news; but it depends upon yourself,
Beth. We are free agents. Good-bye, my dear child, and God bless you."

Beth had been eighteen intolerable months at the school, and had been
exceedingly miserable most of the time, yet she left it with tears in
her eyes, melted and surprised by the kindest farewells from every
one. It had never dawned upon her until that moment that she was
really very much liked.

Her new school was a large house in a long wide street of houses, all
exactly alike. When she arrived with Miss Bey, they were shown into a
deliciously cool shady drawing-room, charmingly furnished, and the
effect upon Beth, after the graceless bareness of St. Catherine's, was
altogether reassuring.

In front of the fireplace, which was hidden by ferns and flowering
plants, a slender girl, with thick dark hair down her back, was lying
on the white woolly hearthrug, reading. She got up to greet the
visitors without embarrassment, still holding her book in her hand.

"Miss Blackburne will be here directly," she said. "Will you sit
down?" Then there was a little pause, which Miss Bey broke by asking
in her magisterial way, "What is that you are reading, my dear?"

"The Idylls of the King," the girl answered.

Miss Bey's nostrils flapped.

"Is it not rather advanced for you, my dear?" she said. "We do not
allow it at all, even to our first-class girls."

"Oh, Miss Blackburne likes us to read it," was the easy answer. "She
says that Tennyson and all the good modern writers are a part of our
education."

"Thank goodness!" Beth ejaculated fervently. "At St. Catherine's our
minds were starved on books suited to the capacity of infants and
imbeciles."

"I should think, Beth, you are hardly old enough or educated enough to
be a judge of literature as yet," Miss Bey said severely.

"Nor do I pretend to be a judge. How can I know anything of literature
when literature is unknown at St. Catherine's? But I should think
babes and sucklings would be wise enough to object to the silly trash
we had instead of literature."

Beth spoke emphatically, shaking herself free of the restrictions of
the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters once for all.

Miss Blackburne came in while she was speaking, and smiled.

"I like to hear a girl express an opinion," she said. "She may be
quite wrong, but she mu