Rosalind Merton ventured on a sly allusion to the scene of the morning.  Priscilla did not make the smallest comment.  Her face remained pale, her eyes untroubled.  There was a new dignity about her.

“What’s up now?” said Rosalind to her friend, Miss Day.  “Is the little Puritan going to defy us all?”

“Oh, don’t worry any more about her,” said Annie, who, for some reason, was in a particularly bad humor.  “I only wish, for my part, Miss Peel had never come to St. Benet’s; I don’t like anything about her, Her heroics are as unpleasant to me as her stoicisms.  But I may as well say frankly, Rosalind, before I drop this detestable subject, that I am quite sure she never stole that five-pound note:  she was as little likely to do it as you, so there!”

There came a knock at the door.  Rosalind flew to open it.  By so doing she hoped that Miss Day would not notice the sudden color which filled her cheeks.

CHAPTER XXVII

 Beautiful Annabel Lee

Circumstances seem to combine to spoil some people.  Maggie Oliphant was one of the victims of fortune, which, while appearing to favor her, gave her in reality the worst training which was possible for a nature such as hers.  She was impulsive, generous, affectionate, but she was also perverse, and, so to speak, uncertain.  She was a creature of moods and she was almost absolutely without self-control; and yet nature had been kind to Maggie, giving her great beauty of form and face and a character which a right training would have rendered noble.

Up to the present, however, this training had scarcely come to Miss Oliphant.  She was almost without relations and she was possessed of more money than she knew what to do with.  She had great abilities and loved learning for the sake of learning, but till she came to St. Benet’s, her education had been as desultory as her life.  She had never been to school; her governess only taught her what she chose to learn.  As a child she was very fickle in this respect, working hard from morning till night one day but idling the whole of the next.  When she was fifteen her guardian took her to Rome.  The next two years were spent in traveling, and Maggie, who knew nothing properly, picked up that kind of superficial miscellaneous knowledge which made her conversation brilliant and added to her many charms.

“You shall be brought out early,” her guardian had said to her.  “You are not educated in the stereotyped fashion, but you know enough.  After you are seventeen I will get you a suitable chaperon and you shall live in London.”