The child nodded her small head.  “Of course you’re going.  I might have known it.  I did know it all along.  You were booked to go.”

“Why, Laura?” Miss Quincey was mystified and a little hurt.

“Because”—­a sinister convulsion passed over the ugly little pariah face—­“because”—­the Mad Hatter had learnt the force of under-statement—­“because I like you.”

At that Miss Quincey broke down.  “My dear little girl—­I am going because I am too old to stay.”

“Write to me, dear,” she said at the last moment; “let me know how you are getting on.”

But she never knew.  The Mad Hatter did not write.  In fact she never wrote anything again, not even verses.  She was handed over next term to Miss Quincey’s brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became Classical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished.  But this is by the way.

As the College clock struck one, Miss Quincey walked home as usual and went up into her bedroom without a word.  She opened a drawer and took from it her Post Office Savings Bank book and looked over her account.  There stood to her credit the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds four shillings and eight pence.  No, not quite that, for the blouse, the abominable blouse, had been paid for out of her savings and it had cost a guinea.  Twenty-six pounds three shillings and eight pence was all that she had saved in five-and-twenty years.  This, with the term’s salary which Miss Cursiter had insisted on, was enough to keep her going for a year.  And a year is a long time.  She came slowly downstairs to the drawing-room where her aunt was dozing and dreaming in her chair.  There still hung about her figure the indefinable dignity that had awed Miss Cursiter.  If she was afraid of Mrs. Moon she was too proud to show her fear.

“This morning,” she said simply, “I received my dismissal.”

The old lady looked up dazed, not with the news but with her dream.  Miss Quincey repeated her statement.

“Do you mean you are not going back to that place there?” she asked mildly.

“I am never going back.”

Still with dignity she waited for the burst of feeling she felt to be justifiable in the circumstances.  None came; neither anger, nor indignation, nor contempt, not even surprise.  In fact the Old Lady was smiling placidly, as she was wont to smile under the spell of the dream.

Slowly, very slowly, it was dawning upon her that the reproach had been taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon.  Henceforth his niece Miss Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large.  At the same time it struck her that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.

“Very well then,” said she, “if I were you I should put on that nice silk blouse in the evenings.”