d, though there
was no need for haste. Meantime the man in the woollen comforter was
buying stamps, and, finishing his bargain before the despatch was
stamped and delivered, went out into the fog, and was no more seen.

CHAPTER IV.--Miss Marlett's.

Girls' schools are chilly places. The unfortunate victims, when you
chance to meet them, mostly look but half-alive, and dismally cold.
Their noses (however charming these features may become in a year
or two, or even may be in the holidays) appear somehow of a frosty
temperature in the long dull months of school-time. The hands, too, of
the fair pupils are apt to seem larger than common, inclined to blue
in color, and, generally, are suggestive of inadequate circulation.
A tendency to get as near the fire as possible (to come within the
frontiers of the hearth-rug is forbidden), and to cower beneath shawls,
is also characteristic of joyous girlhood--school-girlhood, that is. In
fact, one thinks of a girls' school as too frequently a spot where no
one takes any lively exercise (for walking in a funereal procession is
not exercise, or Mutes might be athletes), and where there is apt to be
a pervading impression of insufficient food, insufficient clothing, and
general unsatisfied tedium.

Miss Marlett's Establishment for the Highest Education of Girls, more
briefly known as "The Dovecot, Conisbeare," was no exception, on a
particularly cold February day--the day after Dicky Shields was found
dead--to these pretty general rules. The Dovecot, before it became a
girls' school, was, no doubt, a pleasant English home, where "the fires
wass coot," as the Highlandman said. The red-brick house, with its
lawn sloping down to the fields, all level with snow, stood at a little
distance from the main road, at the end of a handsome avenue of Scotch
pines. But the fires at Miss Marlett's were not good on this February
morning. They never _were_ good at the Dovecot. Miss Marlett was one
of those people who, fortunately for themselves, and unfortunately for
persons dwelling under their roofs, never feel cold, or never know
what they feel. Therefore, Miss Marlett never poked the fire, which,
consequently used to grow black toward its early death, and was only
revived, at dangerously long intervals, by the most minute doses of
stimulant in the shape of rather damp small coals. Now, supplies of coal
had run low at the Dovecot, for the very excellent reason that the roads
were snowed up,