“There’s the bell!  Don’t give us much time, do they?  Now for the torture chamber again!  Brace your nerves!”

“I wonder if most of them have done better or worse than I have!” thought Winona, as she took her seat once more at No. 10 desk.  “A good many were grumbling, but that sandy-haired girl in the spectacles said nothing.  No more did the one with the red hair-ribbon.  Of course they might be feeling too agonized for words, but on the other hand they might be secretly congratulating themselves.”

It was not the moment, however, for speculation as to her neighbors’ progress.  The next set of questions was being distributed, and she took up her copy eagerly.  Her heart fell as she read it over.  Her knowledge of English history was not very accurate, and the facts demanded were for the most part exactly those which she could not remember.  The dread of failure loomed up large.  She could only attempt about half of the questions, and even in these she was not ready with dates.  Then suddenly Percy’s advice flashed into her mind.  “Write from a romantic standpoint, and make your paper sound poetical.”  It seemed rather a forlorn hope, and she feared it would scarcely satisfy her examiners, but in such a desperate situation anything was worth trying.  Winona possessed a certain facility in essay writing.  Prose composition had been her favorite lesson at Miss Harmon’s.  She collected her wits now, and did the very utmost of which she was capable in the matter of style.  Choosing question No. 4, “Write a life of Lady Jane Grey,” she proceeded to treat the subject in as post-impressionist a manner as possible.  The pathetic tragedy of the young Queen had always appealed to her imagination, and she could have had no more congenial a theme upon which to write, if she had been given free choice of all the characters in the history book.

“‘Whom the gods love die young,’” she began, and paused.  It seemed an excellent opening, if she could only continue in the same strain, but what ought to come next?  Her thoughts flew to a painting of Lady Jane Grey, which she had once seen at a loan collection of Tudor portraits.  Why should she not describe it?  Her pen flew rapidly as she wrote a word-picture of the sweet, pale face, so round and childish in spite of its earnest expression; the smooth yellow hair, the gray eyes bent demurely over the book.  Her heroine seemed beginning to live.  Now for her surroundings.  A year ago Winona had paid a visit to Hampton Court, and her remembrance of its associations was still keen and vivid.  She described its old-world garden by the side of the Thames, where the little King Edward VI. must often have roamed with his pretty cousin Jane:  the two wonderful ill-starred children, playing for a brief hour in happy unconsciousness of the fate that faced them.  What did they talk about, she asked, as they stood on the paved terrace and watched the river hurrying by?  Plato, perchance, and his philosophy, or the marvelous geography-book