And one morning when she came upon the Mad Hatter in her corner of the class-room, and found her adding two familiar columns of figures together and adding them all wrong, Miss Quincey was very cross and very captious indeed.  The Mad Hatter explained at more length than ever that the figures twisted themselves about; they wouldn’t stay still a minute so that she could hold them; they were always going on and on, turning over and over, and growing, growing, till there were millions, billions, trillions of them; oh, they were wonderful things those figures; you could go on watching them for ever if you were sharp enough; you could even—­here Laura lowered her voice in awe of her own conception, for Laura was a mystic, a seer, a metaphysician, what you will—­you could even think with them, if you knew how; in short you could do anything with them but turn them into sums.  And as all this was very confusing to the intellect Miss Quincey became crosser than ever.  And while Miss Quincey quivered all over with irritability, the Mad Hatter paid no heed whatever to her instructions, but thrust forward a small yellow face that was all nose and eyes, and gazed at Miss Quincey like one possessed by a spirit of divination.

“Have you got a headache, Miss Quincey?” she inquired on hearing herself addressed for the third time as “Stupid child!”

Miss Quincey relied tartly that no, she had not got a headache.  The Mad Hatter appeared to be absorbed in tracing rude verses on her rough notebook with a paralytic pencil.

“I’m sorry; because then you must be unhappy.  When people are cross,” she continued, “it means one of two things.  Either their heads ache or they are unhappy.  You must be very unhappy.  I know all about it.”  The paralytic pencil wavered and came to a full stop.  “You like somebody, and so somebody has made you unhappy.”

But for the shame of it, Miss Quincey could have put her head down on the desk and cried as she had seen the Mad Hatter cry over her sums, and for the same reason; because she could not put two and two together.

And what Mrs. Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see.  It was Dr. Cautley’s business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and it was Rhoda’s to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly report the slightest threatening of a break-down.  Miss Quincey’s somewhat eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.

After Rhoda’s lunch, soothed with her sympathy and hidden, not to say extinguished, in an enormous chair, Miss Quincey was easily worked into the right mood for confidences; indeed she was in that state of mind when they rush out of their own accord in the utter exhaustion of the will.