It was difficult to find anyone who was disengaged and could come at so short a notice, and Miss Webb, the mistress who finally arrived, was hardly to the taste of the Fourth Form. She had been a private governess in a family, and was not accustomed to class teaching; and the girls discovered in the first half-hour that she had not the slightest notion of how to enforce discipline.

"She told me to stop talking, and when I didn't, she simply took no notice!" chuckled Dora Maxwell.

"And she said: 'Ursula, dear, please do not fidget with your pencil,' in such a mild, apologetic little voice!" laughed Ursula. "Miss Bardsley would have glared, and said: 'Ursula, take a forfeit!'"

"She doesn't know anything, really, about the lessons," said Aldred scornfully. "She kept looking at the book all the time, to follow what we were saying."

"And you remember that sum that came out so funnily? I'm sure the answer was wrong in the book, and I wanted her to work it on the blackboard, but she wouldn't," put in Dora.

"Because she couldn't!" sneered Aldred. "She's evidently no good at arithmetic. We know more ourselves than she does!"

"And when we were having physical geography, and I asked her why the moon really had phases, she said it depended on the tide!"

"Well, she had got rather flustered, and put it the wrong way," interposed Mabel. "Of course, she meant that the tide depended on the moon."

"Then why didn't she say so?"

"You muddle her by asking so many questions."