“She’s not my teacher, thank goodness.  Do you know what I’m going to be some day, when she’s married and gone away?  I’m going to be what she is—­Classical Mistress.  I shan’t have to do any sums for that, you know.  I shall only have to know Greek, and isn’t it a shame, Miss Quincey, they won’t let me learn it till I’m in the Fourth, and I never shall be.  But—­don’t tell any one—­they’ve stuck me here, behind her now, and when she’s coaching that young idiot Susie Parker—­”

“Laura, that is not the way to speak of your school-fellows.”

“I know it isn’t, but she is, you know.  I’ve bought the books, and I get behind them and I listen hard, and I can read now.  What’s more, I’ve done a bit of a chorus.  Look—­” The pariah took a dirty bit of paper from the breast of her gown.  “It goes, ‘Oh Love unconquered in battle,’ and it’s simply splend_if_erous.  Miss Quincey—­when you like anything very much—­or any_body_—­it doesn’t matter which—­do you turn red all over?  Do you have creeps all down your back?  And do you feel it just here?” The child clapped her yellow claw to Miss Quincey’s heart.  “You do, you do, Miss Quincey; I can see it go thump, I can feel it go thud!”

She gazed into the teacher’s face, and again the power of divination was upon her.

“Laura!” Miss Quincey gasped; for the Head had been looming in their neighbourhood, a deadly peril, and now she was sweeping down on them, smiling a dangerous smile.

“Miss Quincey, I hope you’ve been making that child work,” said she and passed on.

“I say!  She didn’t see my verses, did she?  You won’t let on that I wrote them?”

“You’ll never write verses,” said Miss Quincey, deftly improving a bad occasion, “if you don’t understand arithmetic.  Why, it’s the science of numbers.  Come now, if ninety hogsheads—­”

“Oh-h!  I’m so tired of hogsheads; mayn’t it be firkins this time?”

And, for fancy’s sake, firkins Miss Quincey permitted it to be.

Now Rhoda was responsible for much, but for what followed the Mad Hatter must, strictly speaking, be held accountable.

Miss Quincey had never been greatly interested in the movements of her heart; but now that her attention had been drawn to them she admitted that it was beating in a very extraordinary way; there was a decided palpitation, a flutter.

That night she lay awake and listened to it.

It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata (only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway knocks.  Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die.  Then its tactics changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her throat.  Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the floor, down to the bottom of all things.  Miss Quincey did not mind much; she had been so unhappy.  And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.