stair with a perfect and fascinated familiarity.

When she entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall
for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed
with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and
tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her
nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life
she had been an average child of the quick and clever type, with average
faults. But something in the bare, ugly rooms, the discipline, the
teaching, the companionship of Miss Frederick's Cliff House School for
Young Ladies, transformed little Marcella Boyce, for the time being,
into a demon. She hated her lessons, though, when she chose, she could
do them in a hundredth part of the time taken by her companions; she
hated getting up in the wintry dark, and her cold ablutions with some
dozen others in the comfortless lavatory; she hated the meals in the
long schoolroom, where, because twice meat was forbidden and twice
pudding allowed, she invariably hungered fiercely for more mutton and
scorned her second course, making a sort of dramatic story to herself
out of Miss Frederick's tyranny and her own thwarted appetite as she sat
black-browed and brooding in her place. She was not a favourite with her
companions, and she was a perpetual difficulty and trouble to her
perfectly well-intentioned schoolmistress. The whole of her first year
was one continual series of sulks, quarrels, and revolts.

Perhaps her blackest days were the days she spent occasionally in bed,
when Miss Frederick, at her wit's end, would take advantage of one of
the child's perpetual colds to try the effects of a day's seclusion and
solitary confinement, administered in such a form that it could do her
charge no harm, and might, she hoped, do her good. "For I do believe a
great part of it's liver or nerves! No child in her right senses could
behave so," she would declare to the mild and stout French lady who had
been her partner for years, and who was more inclined to befriend and
excuse Marcella than any one else in the house--no one exactly knew why.

Now the rule of the house when any girl was ordered to bed with a cold
was, in the first place, that she should not put her arms outside the
bedclothes--for if you were allowed to read and amuse yourself in bed
you might as well be up; that the housemaid should visit the patient in
the early morning with a