Miss Noakes entered presently and announced that Madame wished to see Cynthia; and that young lady went, with a very red nose, turned up at a very haughty angle. She returned shortly, and addressing herself to Adelaide, as she always did, even when she had something which she wished to communicate to the rest of us, said scornfully:
“Miss Armstrong, will you kindly say to the other young ladies [we were all present], that Madame has just told me that I am indebted to you for permission to remain and graduate with the class.”
A murmur of satisfaction ran around the room.
Cynthia’s eyes flashed fire. “Do not imagine for one moment,” she exclaimed, “that I would accept your hypocritical condescension, if I believed that it had been offered.”
“Don’t you believe that we interceded with Madame?” Winnie asked.
“I believe,” Cynthia replied, “that you have done the best you can, by tale-bearing, to induce Madame to expel me, and have not succeeded; and as I do not wish to associate with you any longer, I have written my parents asking them to withdraw me from the school.”
“I am sure no one will regret your departure,” Adelaide replied, with indignation. But Cynthia did not leave the school. Either her parents were too sensible to take her away just before her graduation, or her remark had been merely an idle threat. Madame gave her a room in another part of the building, and her place in the Amen Corner remained vacant for the rest of the term.
Winnie had finished her essay, and one evening we gathered in the little study parlor to hear her read it. The time for our parting was now very near, and we were all more or less sentimentally inclined. The old Amen Corner was very dear to us. Every piece of furniture had its associations, but none of them were quite so tragical as those which clustered around the old oak cabinet, and it seemed only fitting that Winnie should celebrate it in her parting essay. She apologized for the length of her paper. “Don’t think, girls,” she explained, “that I intend to read all this at commencement. I am going to ask Madame to make selections from it. The task that Professor Waite set me was to give a picture of Florentine life in the early part of the sixteenth century, and to bring in the characters who lived then as naturally as I could—Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, the Medici, Macchiavelli, Bibbiena and his niece, and others. While I was writing, my imagination carried me away, and I gave it free rein. You are the only ones who will have the full dose.”
We were very willing to hear it all. Winnie sat in the great comfortable wicker armchair with the lamplight gloating o’er her mischievous face. Adelaide had ensconced herself on the window seat, her classical profile clear cut against the night. Milly nestled on a cushion at her feet, and I had stretched myself luxuriously on the old lounge, and watched the others from the shadowy side of the room. Milly occasionally patted the cabinet at her side as Winnie referred to it.
The flickering light almost seemed to make the carved faces with which it was decorated grin sardonically, or knit their brows with threatening scowls, as Winnie read: