On the morning of September 8th, precisely at 8.35, Winona presented herself at the school for the scholarship examination.  There were twenty other candidates awaiting the ordeal, in various stages of nervousness or sangfroid.  Some looked dejected, some confident, and others hid their feelings under a mask of stolidity.  Winona joined them shyly.  They were all unknown to one another, and so far nobody had plucked up courage to venture a remark.  It is horribly depressing to sit on a form staring at twenty taciturn strangers.  Winona bore for awhile with the stony silence, then—­rather frightened at the sound of her own voice—­she announced: 

“I suppose we’re all going in for this same exam.!” It was a trite commonplace, but it broke the ice.  Everybody looked relieved.  The atmosphere seemed to clear.

“Yes, we’re all going in—­that’s right enough,” replied a ruddy-haired girl in spectacles, “but there are only two scholarships, so nineteen of us are bound to fail—­that’s logic and mathematics and all the rest of it.”

“Whew!  A nice cheering prospect.  Wish they’d put us out of our misery at once!” groaned a stout girl with a long fair pigtail.

“I’m all upset!” shivered another.

“It’s like a game of musical chairs,” suggested a fourth.  “We’re all scrambling for the same thing, and some are bound to be out of it.”

The ruddy-haired girl laughed nervously.

“Suppose we’ve got to take our sporting luck!” she murmured.

“If nineteen are sure to lose, two are sure to win at any rate,” said Winona.  “That’s logic and mathematics and all the rest of it, too!”

“Right you are!  That’s a more cheering creed!  It doesn’t do to cry ‘Miserere me’ too soon!” chirped a jolly-looking dark-eyed girl with a red hair-ribbon. “‘Never say die till you’re dead,’ is my motto!”

“I’m wearing a swastika for a mascot,” said a short, pale girl, exhibiting her charm, which hung from a chain round her neck.  “I never am lucky, so I thought I’d try what this would do for me for once.  I know English history beautifully down to the end of Queen Anne, and no further, and if they set any questions on the Georges I’ll be stumped.”

“I’ve learnt Africa, but Asia would floor me!” observed another, looking up from a geography book, in which she was making a last desperate clutch at likely items of knowledge.  “I never can remember which side of India Madras is on; I get it hopelessly mixed with Bombay.”

“I wish to goodness they’d go ahead and begin,” mourned the owner of the red hair-ribbon.  “It’s this waiting that knocks the spirit out of me.  Patience isn’t my pet virtue.  I call it cruelty to animals to leave us on tenter-hooks.”

Almost as if in answer to her pathetic appeal the door opened, and a teacher appeared.  In a brisk, business-like manner she marshaled the candidates into line, and conducted them to the door of the head-mistress’ study, where one by one they were admitted for a brief private interview.  Winona’s turn came about the middle of the row.