could not be expected to forego a legitimate grievance.

She read Louise a little lecture on punctuality and politeness, and settled at once to the work in hand. She said, with intention, that they must not waste any more time.

Louise submitted with her usual meekness, and did, Alwynne could see, do her utmost to apply herself to her work. But her answers were ludicrously vague and mal à propos, and she met Alwynne's comments, momentarily sharper, with an abstracted smile.

Suddenly Alwynne lost patience with her.

"I don't know what's the matter with you to-day, Louise," she said sharply. "I don't believe you've taken in a word of what I've said. If you can't take a little more trouble, I'd better go home."

Louise, obviously and pathetically jerked back to consciousness from some dreamer's Paradise, looked up at her with scared, apologetic eyes. The radiance dimmed slowly from her face. She made no answer, only to put up her hand to her head, with a queer little gesture of helplessness.

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Alwynne, but already more gently. Her anger was always fleeting as a puff of smoke.

But Louise merely shrugged her shoulders and looked vaguely at her again. Then she returned to her work.

Alwynne, walking up and down the room watched her intently[63] as she bent over the Latin grammar. She was wrinkling her brows over a piece of prose that she had already construed at the previous lesson, and with an ease that had astonished Alwynne. She looked bewildered and put her hand to her head again. Her efforts to recall her wandering thoughts were patent and almost physical in their intensity; her small hand hovered, contracting and relaxing, like a baby catching at butterflies.

[63]

Alwynne was puzzled by her. The child was sincere: but obviously something momentous had happened, and was still occupying her, to the exclusion of all else. Alwynne wished that she had been less hasty: she felt that she should not have checked her.

She stood a moment beside her, reading what she had written. It was scarcely legible, and made no sense. She put a hand on her shoulder—

"Louise, you are writing nonsense. What is it? Tell me what the matter is?"

Louise laid down her pen, gave her a 

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