Early the next day my new life began in real earnest.  Miss Susan Bagshot did not allow me to waste my time in idleness until the arrival of my pupils.  She gave me a pile of exercises to correct, and some difficult needlework to finish; and I found I had indeed a sharp taskmistress in this blighted lady.

‘Girls of your age are so incorrigibly idle,’ she said; ’but I must give you to understand at once that you will have no time for dawdling at Albury Lodge.  The first bell rings a quarter before six, and at a quarter past I shall expect to see you in the schoolroom.  You will superintend the younger pupils’ pianoforte practice from that time till eight o’clock, at which hour we breakfast.  From nine till twelve you will take the second division of the second class for English, according to the routine arranged by me, which you had better copy from a paper I will lend you for that purpose.  After dinner you will take the same class for two hours’ reading until four; from four to five you will superintend the needle-work class.  Your evenings—­with the exception of the careful correction of all the day’s exercises—­will be your own.  I hope you have a sincere love of your vocation, Miss Crofton.’

I said I hoped I should grow to like my work as I became accustomed to it.  I had never yet tried teaching, except with my young sister and brothers.  My hear sank as I remembered our free-and-easy studies in the sunny parlour at home, or out in the garden under the pink and white hawthorns sometimes on balmy mornings in the early summer.

Miss Susan shook her head doubtfully.

’Unless you have a love of your vocation you will never succeed, Miss Crofton,’ she said solemnly.

I freely confess that this love she spoke of never came to me.  I tried to do my duty, and I endured all the hardships of my life in, I hope, a cheerful spirit.  But the dry monotony of the studies had no element of pleasantness, and I used to wonder how Miss Susan could derive pleasure—­as it was evident she did—­from the exercise of her authority over those hapless scholars who had the misfortune to belong to her class.  Day after day they heard the same lectures, listened submissively to the same reproofs, and toiled on upon that bleak bare high-road to learning, along which it was her delight to drive them.  Nothing like a flower brightened their weary way—­it was all alike dust and barrenness; but they ploughed on dutifully, cramming their youthful minds with the hardest dates and facts to be found in the history of mankind, the dreariest statistics, the driest details of geography, and the most recondite rules of grammar, until the happy hour arrived in which they took their final departure from Albury Lodge, to forget all they had learnt there in the briefest possible time.

How my thoughts used to wander away sometimes as I sat at my desk, distracted by the unmelodious sound of Miss Susan’s voice lecturing some victim in her own division at the next table, while one of the girls in mine droned drearily at Lingard, or Pinnock’s Goldsmith, as the case might be!  How the vision of my own bright home haunted me during those long monotonous afternoons, while the March winds made the poplars rock in the garden outside the schoolroom, or the April rain beat against the great bare windows!