y devised by an imaginative
child, well aware, in spite of appearances, that she was of an old
family and had aristocratic relations. Then, when the Princess had held
out a gracious hand and smiled, all was delight! Marcella grew up on the
instant: she was beautiful, of course; she had, so people said, the
"Boyce eyes and hair;" she had sweeping gowns, generally of white muslin
with cherry-coloured ribbons; she went here and there with the Princess,
laughing and talking quite calmly with the greatest people in the land,
her romantic friendship with the adored of England making her all the
time the observed of all observers, bringing her a thousand delicate
flatteries and attentions.

Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest
summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening
her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare
white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper
opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet
stretching away on either hand. The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the
depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of
the Princess's maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty
child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in
contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single "party
frock," and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb
day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold
was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a
page of Ince's "Outlines of English History" in the chilly schoolroom,
at seven.

Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie
of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of
amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily
miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social
difference between herself and her companions. Some proportion of the
girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three
neighbouring towns. Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal
on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her
establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt
themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs
which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like
Marcella Boyce. Even a