't pretend I am
anything else, but I won't talk to you now."

"Oh!" said poor Verena. "Oh!"

Before she reached the door of the room she had burst into tears. Her
agony was so great at Pauline's behavior to her that her tears became
sobs, and her sobs almost cries of pain. Pauline, lying on the bed, did
not take the least notice of Verena. She turned her head away, and when
her sister had left the room and shut the door Pauline sprang from the
bed and turned the key in the lock.

"Now, I am safe," she thought. "What is the matter with me? There never
was anything so hard as the heart that is inside me. I don't care a bit
whether Renny cries or whether she doesn't cry. I don't care a bit what
happens to any one. I only want to be let alone."

At dinner-time Pauline appeared, and tried to look as though nothing had
happened. The other girls looked neat and pretty. They had not the least
idea through what a tragedy Verena and Pauline were now living. Verena
showed marks of her storm of weeping, and her face was terribly
woebegone. Miss Tredgold guessed that things were coming to a crisis, and
she was prepared to wait.

Now, Miss Tredgold was a very good woman; she was also a very wise and a
very temperate one. She was filled with a spirit of forbearance, and with
the beautiful grace of charity. She was all round as good a woman as ever
lived; but she was not a mother. Had she been a mother she would have
gone straight to Pauline and put her arms round her, and so acted that
the hard little heart would have melted, and the words that could not
pass her lips would have found themselves able to do so, and the misery
and the further sin would have been averted. But instead of doing
anything of this sort, Miss Tredgold resolved to assemble the children
after breakfast the next day, and to talk to them in a very plain way
indeed; to assemble all before her, and to entreat the guilty ones to
confess, promising them absolute forgiveness in advance. Having made up
her mind, she felt quite peaceful and happy, and went down to interview
her brother-in-law.

Mr. Dale still continued to like his study. He made no further objection
to the clean and carefully dusted room. If any one had asked him what was
passing in his mind, he might have said that the spirits of Homer and
Virgil approached the sacred precincts where he wrote about them and
lived for them night after night, and that they put the place in order.
He kept the rough