“I did it, Miss Rutherford.  I have killed Harriet.  I, and nobody else.”

“You?  How, child?”

“I killed her with the slate, Miss Rutherford; this slate, look.”

She pointed to a slate without a frame which lay on the floor.  There were sums worked on the uppermost side, and the pencil-marks were half obliterated.  For a moment the schoolmistress’s amazement held her motionless, but fresh and louder moans recalled her to the immediate necessities of the case.  She pushed Ida Starr aside, and, with the help of a servant-girl who had by this time appeared in the room, raised the sufferer into a chair, and began to apply what remedies suggested themselves.  The surgeon, whom several of the children had hastened to seek, only lived a few yards away, and his assistant was speedily present.  Harriet Smales had quite recovered consciousness, and was very soon able to give her own account of the incident.  After listening to her, Miss Rutherford turned to the schoolchildren, who were now seated in the usual order on benches, and spoke to them with some degree of calm.

“I am going to take Harriet home.  Lucy Wood, you will please to see that order is preserved in my absence; I shall only be away twenty minutes, at the most.  Ida Starr, you will go up into my sitting-room, and remain there till I come to you.  All take out your copy-books; I shall examine the lines written whilst I am away.”

The servant, who had been despatched for a cab, appeared at the door.  Harriet Smales was led out.  Before leaving the house, Miss Rutherford whispered to the servant an order to occupy herself in the sitting-room, so as to keep Ida Starr in sight.

Miss Rutherford, strict disciplinarian when her nerves were not unstrung, was as good as her promise with regard to the copy-books.  She had returned within the twenty minutes, and the first thing she did was to walk along all the benches, making a comment here, a correction there, in another place giving a word of praise.  Then she took her place at the raised desk whence she was wont to survey the little room.

There were present thirteen pupils, the oldest of them turned fifteen, the youngest scarcely six.  They appeared to be the daughters of respectable people, probably of tradesmen in the neighbourhood.  This school was in Lisson Grove, in the north-west of London; a spot not to be pictured from its name by those ignorant of the locality; in point of fact a dingy street, with a mixture of shops and private houses.  On the front door was a plate displaying Miss Rutherford’s name,—­nothing more.  That lady herself was middle-aged, grave at all times, kindly, and, be it added, fairly competent as things go in the world of school.  The room was rather bare, but the good fire necessitated by the winter season was not wanting, and the plain boarding of the floor showed itself no stranger to scrubbings.  A clock hanging on the wall ticked very loudly in the perfect stillness as the schoolmistress took her seat.