rather husky as she spoke the last few
sentences, but she did not cry, she only sat and stared rather fixedly
at the various timetables with which the table was strewn.

Margaret put out her hand and touched her timidly on the arm, and the
silent token of sympathy pleased Eleanor who could not have borne her to
have spoken just then.

There was a moment or two of silence, during which the rain splashed
steadily, drearily against the dusty window panes. It had settled now
into a thoroughly wet afternoon, and there seemed very little prospect of
its clearing before nightfall.

"I have often wondered since what would have become of me then," Eleanor
resumed after those few moments of silence, "had it not been for Miss
McDonald. She was an old governess of my mother's and had a girls' school
in Hampstead, and when she heard how I was left she wrote and offered me
a home with her until I was old enough to earn my own living. I was to be
a sort of pupil teacher, if you know what that means--to do lessons with
the elder girls and to teach the younger ones--and in that way my
services were supposed to pay for my board and teaching. But I am quite
sure that at first, at any rate, Miss McDonald was a loser by the
transaction. I was woefully ignorant to begin with, and knew scarcely
more than a child of nine, and I was so miserable that I did not care
what became of me or what I did. Looking back now on that time I see that
Miss McDonald was wonderfully kind and patient, and that it was for my
own good that she insisted upon my working. But for a long time I don't
suppose there was a more unhappy girl in the whole of England than
myself. I hated England and the school and everything, and, of course, it
was a tremendous contrast to my former life, for it wasn't even as though
the school were a good school; it was quite second class, and the girls
were hopelessly common. And then all of a sudden consolation came to me,
and poor little drudge of a pupil teacher that I was, snubbed by the
elder girls and bored to death by the younger ones, I became happy again,
though in quite a different way to any happiness I had ever known
before."

"How?" said Margaret, who had been listening to this narrative with
parted lips and eager eyes.

After this, Eleanor Humphreys' conversation would seem tame indeed, for
at the bottom of her heart Margaret knew that, pretend to the contrary as
much as she liked, nothing that Eleanor Humphreys said e