open invitation to several houses, but I am saving up Brussels for
Easter, when the weather will be better, and it will be more of a
change. And I have an old grand-aunt in the North, but she is an
invalid, confined to her room. I should be an extra trouble in the
house. I shall manage to amuse myself somehow. It will be an
opportunity for exploring London."

"Oh well," Cecil said vaguely, "when I come back!" but she spoke no word
of Christmas Day.

The next week brought the various festivities with which Saint
Cuthbert's celebrated the end of the Christmas term. There was a school
dance in the big class-room, a Christmas-tree party, given to the
children in an East End parish, and last and most important of all the
breaking-up ceremony in the local Town Hall, when an old girl, now
developed into a celebrated authoress, presented the prizes, and gave an
amusing account of her own schooldays, which evoked storms of applause
from the audience, even Miss Farnborough smiling benignly at the recital
of misdoings which would have evoked her sternest displeasure on the
part of present-day pupils! Then the singing-class girls sang a short
cantata, and the eldest girls gave a scene from Shakespeare, very dull
and exceedingly correct, and the youngest girls acted a little French
play, while the French mistress stood in the wings, ready to prompt, her
face very hot, and her feet very cold, and her heart beating at express
speed.

This moment was a public test of her work during the term, and she had a
horror that the children would forget their parts and disgrace their
leader as well as themselves. She need not have feared, however, for
the publicity which she dreaded was just the stimulus needed to spur the
juvenile actors to do their very best, and they shrugged, they
gesticulated, they rolled their r's, they reproduced Claire's own little
mannerisms with an _aplomb_ which brought down the house. Claire's lack
of teaching experience might make her less sound on rules and routine,
but it was obvious that she had succeeded in one important point; she
had lifted "French" from the level of a task, and converted it into a
living tongue.

Miss Farnborough was very gracious in her parting words to her new
mistress.

"I have not come to my present position without learning to trust my
perceptions," said she. "I recognised at once that you possessed the
true teaching instinct, and to-day you have justified my choice. I h