s came
suddenly to Sissy. All the world seemed bent on compelling her to
forswear herself.

"Cecilia!" commanded Miss Madigan.

Sissy stiffened.

"You've disturbed my reading enough this morning. If you say another
word I'll--"

"Oh, Aunt Anne--"

"Go over to the wall, Cecilia, and stand with your back to me for five
minutes."

With a fiendish light in her eye--a light of such desperate satisfaction
as betokened one gladly driven to commit the unforgivable Sissy moved
toward the sensitive-plant in the window.

"Not there! That poor plant seems to suffer sympathetically with your
badness. Stand over by the bureau."

Sissy obeyed. Her rage at being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage
that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her
knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into
dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man
might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been
mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her self-made
commandments.

She was standing with her nose pressed firmly against the green
wall-paper, her back laid open as by a surgical operation, and a towel,
which her aunt had forced into the aperture for drying purposes,
dangling down behind, when Kate, passing the door on her way to
breakfast, glanced in.

Her sputtering, quickly stifled screech of laughter sent Sissy spinning
about as a bull does when the banderilla is planted in his quivering
flesh. She looked at the doorway; it was empty, but she heard scurrying
footsteps without. Kate was on her way to tell the others.

She looked at Aunt Anne. That severe lady had dropped her book and,
seized by the contagion, was shaking with silent laughter.

Not a word did Sissy say. Her expression of disgust,--disgust that a
grown-up should be so silly as to see something funny in absolutely
nothing; disgust that her aunt should so weaken the effect of her own
discipline,--reinforced by the green smudge on her nose, rubbed off the
wall-paper, finished Miss Madigan. The lady no longer attempted to
conceal the disgraceful fact that she was laughing. She gave an audible
gurgle, and began to wipe the tears of enjoyment from her eyes.

In that moment the iron entered into Sissy Madigan's soul. She turned
again to the wall, and taking a pin which had fastened the bow of ribbon
at her throat, she pricked slowly but relentlessly in the loose
wall-paper t