r feet.

"Now, what bed is she to get, Mrs. Duncan? Let us go up stairs and see
the dormitory."

"I thought I would put her in the room with Kate: I changed the small
bed in there. If you will just step up stairs, Miss Mackenzie?"

The party reached the dormitory by a narrow wooden staircase, the
whiteness of which testified to the scrubbing powers of Kate's red arms
and those of her compeers. All the windows were open, and the east wind
came in at its will, nippingly cold if airy. They passed through a
large, low-ceilinged room into a smaller one, in which were only four
beds: a small iron stretcher beside the window was pointed out as
Baubie's. Miss Mackenzie turned down the red-knitted coverlet and looked
at the blankets. They were perfectly clean, like everything else, and,
like everything else too, very coarse and very well worn.

"This will do very nicely.--Baubie, this is to be your bed."

Baubie, fresh from the lock-up and Kennedy's Lodgings, might have been
expected to show some trace of her sense of comparison, but not a
vestige of expression crossed her face: she looked up in civil
acknowledgment of having heard: that was all.

"I shall look in again in the course of a week," announced Miss
Mackenzie.--"Good-bye, Baubie: do everything Mrs. Duncan tells you."

With this valedictory Miss Mackenzie left the matron, and Kate attended
her down stairs; and Baubie was at last alone.

She remained standing stock-still when they left her by the
bedside--when the door, shut by Kate, who went out last, hid them from
her view. She listened in a stupid kind of way to the feet tramping on
the bare boards of the outer dormitory and down the stairs: then all was
still, and Baubie Wishart, clean, clothed and separated from her father
for the first time in her life, was left alone to consider how she liked
"school." She felt cold and strange and lonely, and for about three
minutes' space she abandoned herself without reserve to the sensation.
Then the heavy shoes troubled her, and in a fit of anger and impatience
she suddenly began to unlace one. Some far-off sound startled her, and
with a furtive, timorous look at the door she fastened it up again. No
one came, but instead of returning to the boot she sprang to the window,
and, mounting the narrow sill, prepared to survey the domain that lay
below it. There was not much to see. The window looked out on the back
green, which was very much like the front, save that ther