The girls and Jimmy Weaver ran clattering down the stairs, in an agreeably breathless state of excitement.  In their opinion the awfulness of the situation had been adequately recognized by the teacher and signaled by the equally awful expedient of a visit to the Principal’s office, the last resort in the case of the rarely occurring insubordinate boy.

Because Miss Miller had not the least idea what to say in an event so far out of the usual routine, she talked a great deal during the trip through the empty halls and staircases up to the Principal’s office on the top floor; chiefly to the effect that as many years as she had taught, never had she encountered such a bad little girl as Judith.  Judith received this in stony silence, but Sylvia’s tears fell fast.  All the years of her docile school existence had trained her in the habit of horror at insubordination above every other crime.  She felt as disgraced as though Judith had been caught stealing,—­perhaps more so.

Miss Miller knocked at the door; the Principal, stooping and hollow-chested, opened it and stood confronting with tired, kind eyes the trio before him—­the severe woman, with her pathetic, prematurely old face and starved flat body, the pretty little girl hanging down her head and weeping, the smaller child who gave him one black defiant look and then gazed past him out of the window.

“Well, Miss Miller—?” he asked.

“I’ve brought you a case that I don’t know what to do with,” she began.  “This is Judith Marshall, in the third grade, and she has just done one of the naughtiest things I ever heard of—­”

When she had finished her recital, “How do you know this child did it?” asked Mr. Bristol, always his first question in cases between teachers and pupils.

“She was so brazen as to come right back and tell us so,” said Miss Miller, her tone growing more and more condemnatory.

Judith’s face, capable of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate.  Mr. Bristol looked at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls.  “And what has this little girl to do with anything?” he asked.

“This is Sylvia Marshall, Judith’s sister, and of course she feels dreadfully about Judith’s doing such a dreadful thing,” explained Miss Miller inelegantly.

Mr. Bristol walked back to his desk and sat down.  “Well, I think I needn’t keep you any longer, Miss Miller,” he said.  “If you will just leave the little girls here for a while perhaps I can decide what to do about it.”

Thus mildly but unmistakably dismissed, the teacher took her departure, pushing Sylvia and Judith inside the door and shutting it audibly after her.  She was so tired as she walked down the stairs that she ached, and she thought to herself, “As if things weren’t hard enough without their going and being naughty—!”