ence of the new suburb, the owner of Briarcroft had
retreated farther afield, glad enough to escape the proximity of
unwelcome neighbours, and to let the Hall to a suitable tenant. As Miss
Poppleton announced in her prospectuses, the house was eminently fitted
for a school: the situation was healthy, yet conveniently near to the
town, the rooms were large and airy, the garden contained several tennis
courts, and there was a field at the back for hockey. Visiting masters
and mistresses augmented the ordinary staff of teachers, and Greyfield
was well provided with good swimming baths, Oxford Extension lectures,
high-class concerts, art exhibitions, and other educational privileges
not always to be met with in a provincial town. On the other hand, the
country was within easy reach. Ten minutes' walk led on to comparatively
rural roads, and within half an hour you could find yourself beginning
to climb the fells, with a long stretch of heather for a prospect, and
the pure moorland air filling your lungs.

Miss Poppleton, the Principal of the school, irreverently nicknamed
"Poppie" by her pupils, was a double B.A., for she had taken her degree
in both classics and mathematics. She was a rather small, determined
little lady, with a bright complexion, sharp, short-sighted,
greenish-grey eyes, which peered at the world through a pair of round
rimless spectacles, but seemed nevertheless to see everything ("too
much", the habitual sinners affirmed!), what the girls called "an
enquiring nose", grey hair brushed back quite straight from a square,
"brainy"-looking forehead, and a mouth that had a habit of pursing and
unpursing itself very rapidly when its owner was at all irritated or
disturbed in mind. She was a good organizer, a strict disciplinarian,
and a clever teacher--everything that is admirable, in fact, in a
headmistress, from the scholastic point of view; and her vigorous,
intellectual, capable personality always made an excellent impression
upon parents and guardians. By the girls themselves she was regarded in
a less favourable light: the very qualities which gave her success as a
Principal caused her to seem distant and unapproachable. Her pupils
held her in wholesome awe, but never expanded in her presence; to them
she was the supreme authority, the "she-who-must-be-obeyed", but not a
human individual who might be met on any common ground of mutual tastes
and sympathies.

Miss Poppleton had a younger sister, whose na