y slow and painful experience
that bright amusing manners may be worthless unless allied to more
sterling qualities. She had been wont to admire Netta's easy style,
and even to try to copy it; now it struck her as hollow and vapid. If
only she could have started quite afresh, with no guilty memories to
disturb her, she felt she had the chance of getting into a better set
in her Form. But what would Elspeth Frazer, Hilda Browne, Iris Watson,
or any of the nicer girls think of her conduct, both in regard to the
broken-china episode or the transferred essay? She knew it would not
accord with their code of honour.

"I wish I had the courage to tell Miss Roscoe everything," groaned
Gwen. "It would have been the straightest course if I'd gone and
confessed at once when I smashed the china. It would have saved a
great many complications. Dare I possibly tell now?"

She walked along the passage to the study. The door was open, so she
peeped cautiously in. Miss Roscoe sat correcting papers, and nobody
else was in the room. If she wished to make her confession, here was
certainly her opportunity. Her heart beat and thumped, and the words
seemed to freeze upon her lips. Miss Roscoe looked so stern as she sat
at her desk making pencil notes on the margins of the exercises; there
was a hard, uncompromising expression on her face which Gwen knew only
too well, and which did not tend in the direction of tenderness
towards wrongdoers. Gwen was still smarting from the scolding she had
received for her conversation with Dick out of the window. If Miss
Roscoe viewed that peccadillo so seriously, what would she say to the
tale which her pupil had to unfold?

"I daren't! I daren't!" thought Gwen. "No, I really can't screw up the
courage. I loathe myself for a deceitful wretch, and yet--oh,
dear!--there's nothing in this world I dread so much as being found
out!"

She ran down the passage again with a sense of relief. One voice in
her heart assured her that she had escaped a danger, though another
upbraided her for her cowardice.

"If Miss Roscoe hadn't looked quite so severe I might have ventured,"
she sighed in response to the latter. "I don't believe I'll get even
so far as the study door again."

So a golden opportunity was lost, and Gwen, who might even thus late
have chosen the straighter, harder path, shirked the disagreeable
experience, and was left perforce to reap the harvest of her own
sowing.

CHAPTER XVIII

Gwe