gorge when your heart was breaking. She is going to ask her mother to let her leave next term, for she says she simply cannot stand our bedroom after I’m gone. She and Lorna don’t get on a bit, and I was always having to keep the peace. I promised faithfully I would write sheets upon sheets to them every single week, because my leaving at half term makes it harder for them than if they were going home too.

“We shall be so flat and dull without you, Circle!” Myra said. She calls me “Circle” because I’m fat—not awfully, you know, but just a little bit, and she’s so thin herself. “I think I’ll turn over a new leaf and go in for work. I don’t seem to have any heart for getting into scrapes by myself!”

“Well, we have kept them going, haven’t we!” I said. “Do you remember,” and then we talked over the hairbreadth escapes we had had, and groaned to think that the good times were passed.

“I will say this for Una,” said Florence, “however stupid she may be at lessons, I never met a girl who was cleverer at scenting a joke!”

When Florence says a thing, she means it, so it was an awful compliment, and I was just trying to look humble when Mary came in to say Miss Martin wanted me in the drawing-room. I did feel bad, because I knew it would be our last real talk, and she looked simply sweet in her new blue dress and her Sunday afternoon expression. She can look as fierce as anything and snap your head off if you vex her, but she’s a darling all the same, and I adore her. She’s been perfectly sweet to me these three years, and we have had lovely talks sometimes—serious talks, I mean—when I was going to be confirmed, and when father was ill, and when I’ve been homesick. She’s so good, but not a bit goody, and she makes you long to be good too. She’s just the right person to have a girls’ school, for she understands how girls feel, and that it isn’t natural for them to be solemn, unless of course they are prigs, and they don’t count.

I sat down beside her and we talked for an hour. I wish I could remember all the things she said, and put them down here to be my rules for life, but it’s so difficult to remember.

She said my gaiety and lightness of heart had been a great help to them all, and like sunshine in the school. Of course, it had led me into scrapes at times, but they had been innocent and kindly, and so she had not been hard upon me. But now I was grown up and going out into the battle of life, and everything was different.

“You 

 Prev. P 2/133 next