Then came the inevitable tussle with the cabman as to the fare, during which Kitty glanced about her at the people on the platform, picking out with special interest those boys and girls who looked as though they also were going to school, and expending on them a great amount of pity which was probably in some cases quite wasted.

At last came the summons to “get in,” and Kitty got into the musty old cab beside her aunt, and they were started on the last stage of their journey through rain-washed busy streets, where the people were hurrying along under umbrellas, or in omnibuses and cabs.  Now and then a cab laden with luggage would lumber past them on its way to the station, and Kitty’s mind would follow the people inside it through a whole long chapter of imaginary happenings until something else passed and distracted her thoughts.

By-and-by they left the streets, and came to a quiet suburb, where road after road, lined on either side with houses exactly like each other, stretched in depressing monotony.  To Kitty it looked the very acme of correct, neat, yet hateful propriety, and her thoughts flew back longingly to the dear old irregular wind-swept street of Gorlay, which was to her then the most lovable and lovely spot on the face of the earth.  At last, when she was almost tired of speculating on the people who lived in the houses they were passing, and of pitying them for being condemned to such a fate, the jolting cab drew up before a corner house, one of the primmest of all the houses in the dullest of all the roads they had passed that afternoon, and Kitty saw a shining brass plate on the rails at the foot of the tiny patch of trim garden, and on the brass plate “Miss Pidsley.”

That was all.  And this was the place that was to be her home!  It was quite a small school to which she had been banished—­a small private one where a few girls “who needed particular attention and training received the individual care they needed,” as Aunt Pike carefully read out from the prospectus, dealing poor Kitty thus the last and most crushing insult.

If the outside of the house had been unlike home and Gorlay, the inside was even more so; the extreme neatness, the absolute spotlessness of everything, the bareness, the high, square, ugly rooms, each and all weighed on Kitty’s spirits with a fresh load of depression.  At the thought of being left there for months together with not a face about her that she knew, or a person who cared for her, she felt positively sick with misery.  She even dreaded the moment when Aunt Pike should depart.  But the moment soon came, and with a peck at Kitty’s cheek, and a last request that she would make the most of the excellent opportunities for improvement now opening out before her, and a desire that she would try to be a good girl.  Aunt Pike left her, and Kitty gazed after her with eyes aching with the tears she would not shed.  She pictured her journeying home to Gorlay, saw her driving up through the street, drawing up before the old house, the door opening and the light streaming out, and Betty and Tony—­and then the tears came, whether she would or no, and drowned every thought and sight and sound but that of her own misery.