Then, when she was at the very top of ecstasy, floating in the softest summer sea of fancy, some little noise would startle her into opening her eyes, and there beside her in the deepening dusk would be the bare white beds of her two dormitory companions, the ugly wall-paper opposite, and the uncovered boards with their frugal strips of carpet stretching away on either hand.  The tea-bell would ring perhaps in the depths far below, and the sound would complete the transformation of the Princess’s maid-of-honour into Marcie Boyce, the plain naughty child, whom nobody cared about, whose mother never wrote to her, who in contrast to every other girl in the school had not a single “party frock,” and who would have to choose next morning between another dumb day of senna-tea and gruel, supposing she chose to plead that her cold was still obstinate, or getting up at half-past six to repeat half a page of Ince’s “Outlines of English History” in the chilly schoolroom, at seven.

Looking back now as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child’s daily miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social difference between herself and her companions.  Some proportion of the girls at Cliff House were drawn from the tradesman class of two or three neighbouring towns.  Their tradesmen papas were sometimes ready to deal on favourable terms with Miss Frederick for the supply of her establishment; in which case the young ladies concerned evidently felt themselves very much at home, and occasionally gave themselves airs which alternately mystified and enraged a little spitfire outsider like Marcella Boyce.  Even at ten years old she perfectly understood that she was one of the Boyces of Brookshire, and that her great-uncle had been a famous Speaker of the House of Commons.  The portrait of this great-uncle had hung in the dining room of that pretty London house which now seemed so far away; her father had again and again pointed it out to the child, and taught her to be proud of it; and more than once her childish eye had been caught by the likeness between it and an old grey-haired gentleman who occasionally came to see them, and whom she called “Grandpapa.”  Through one influence and another she had drawn the glory of it, and the dignity of her race generally, into her childish blood.  There they were now—­the glory and the dignity—­a feverish leaven, driving her perpetually into the most crude and ridiculous outbreaks, which could lead to nothing but humiliation.

“I wish my great-uncle were here! He’d make you remember—­you great—­you great—­big bully you!”—­she shrieked on one occasion when she had been defying a big girl in authority, and the big girl—­the stout and comely daughter of a local ironmonger—­had been successfully asserting herself.

The big girl opened her eyes wide and laughed.