e. As she approached it she saw
silhouetted against the moon a small figure, head bent upon drawn-up
knees, silent, "lonely as a cloud."

"My dear, thee will take thy death of cold," she said gently, leaning
over the girl.

She lifted tragic, pitiful eyes to Mrs. Benjamin's.

"Have you come to send me home?"

"No, I've come to take thee to bed,"--simply.

She drew the girl to her feet, put her hand on her shoulder; and
together, in silence, they approached the house. She led her to the fire
and chaffed her cold hands.

"You ought to punish me," said Isabelle at last.

"My dear, when any one at Hill Top breaks the rules, or acts wilfully,
we ask her to punish herself."

Isabelle could scarcely believe her ears.

"I think thee has been sufficiently punished, Isabelle, and now I shall
give thee a hot lemonade to warm thee up before thee goes to bed," the
kind voice went on.

Suddenly without warning, Isabelle threw herself on the couch and began
to sob. Not like a child's easy tears, but like the tortured sobbing of
a nature long pent up. Mrs. Benjamin said nothing. She sat down on the
couch, drew the child's head into her lap, and let the spasm spend
itself.

So it was that Isabelle, who never wept, spent her first evening at Hill
Top School.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The period of adjustment to life at the Hill Top School was a very
bewildering one to Isabelle. The excitement over Peggy's accident was
soon past, to that heroine's intense regret. She prolonged her nervous
prostration as long as possible, and was duly petted and made much of by
the girls. Isabelle, full of remorse for the trouble she had brought
upon her room-mate, adopted her as her special charge.

The routine of the school, if you could call it that, began. Mr. and
Mrs. Benjamin had strange ideas in regard to the training of the young.
They kept the school small, so that they might not be hampered in their
experiments, and strangely enough, they drew their pupils largely from
the families of the rich. When he was asked about this once, Mr.
Benjamin said:

"It seems to be our mission to teach these little richlings to

'Ride a cock horse,
To Banbury Cross,
To see what money _can't_ buy!'

"They get life so crookedly from servants and such," he added. "Phoebe
and I just try to straighten them out."

The process by which these two rare souls accomplished this straightening
out