Miss Ashton had wished from the first that the older girls should be examined without the knowledge of the little ones, but her mother had decided otherwise; and the great Teacher above had overruled her wish for His own purposes, for He had a little instrument of His own unconsciously working for Him, and leading a wavering heart into the ways of truth by the light of her own steady example.
But Miss Ashton, knowing nothing of this, was sorry that her lambs had heard so much; especially when she found that their minds were quite distracted, and that it was almost impossible to settle them to the business of the day. She had to overlook a good many things that morning.
She was all the more sorry when, as Maggie and Bessie were going down-stairs with Jane, on their way home, she heard the former say, "Bessie, I'm not going to say anything unkind about Mrs. Ashton; but when I say my prayers to-night, I'm just going to tell our Father how very thankful I am that He did not give her to me for my teacher. I'm very sure she'd bring down my hair with sorrow to the grave, if she was."
CHAPTER X.
A LITTLE LIGHT.
Bessie would have liked to have had a word or two with Kate during recess, but when she peeped into the other room, she saw all the rest of the girls gathered around her; and not caring to talk, or to be talked to by them, she ran away again without being noticed, and followed her sister down to the music-room.
The girls of the older class were all in a state of great excitement over the trouble of the morning. Some were anxious, some pitying, some saying that Mrs. Ashton was making a great fuss about a trifle. Fanny Berry, who had been weeping and sobbing at intervals through all the lesson-hours, was now drowned in a fresh flood of tears, and bewailing her hard fate in having to go to Mrs. Ashton "for a lecture" after school.
"And I suppose she'll complain to my father too," she moaned. "She has been saying she would do so the next time any of the masters reported me; and now she'll tell him this—the hateful old thing!—and he won't let me go to the birthday party at my aunt's. O Kate, why did you tell? You promised you would not—you promised! Of course I could not let Mrs. Ashton go on giving you more than your own share of blame, and so I was forced to speak. It's just as Mary said it would be if any one told their own part. It must needs bring the rest into trouble; and after we two had denied it too! You ought to have stood by us."
"Were you in it too, Mary?" asked Ella Leroy; and she, as well as most of the others, looked at Mary in shocked surprise. To some of them it was no very great matter that the four who had had any share in the accident to the clock should shrink from confessing it, or even keep silence when Mrs. Ashton had asked who had done it; but a deliberate denial of their guilt was quite another thing. They deservedly blamed Fanny for her first falsehood; but they had the feeling that she had half redeemed her sin when she had, at the risk of such shame and mortification to herself, acknowledged that, and her former fault, rather than allow Kate to receive a more severe reproof than she merited. But Mary, who it seemed had been as much to blame as the others, had not even then been shamed into telling the truth, and had still let Mrs. Ashton believe her innocent.
She was heartily ashamed of it now; but she did not choose to let that be seen, and carried matters with a high hand, tossing her head and declaring that she was "not going to be such a fool as to get herself into difficulty just because Kate and Fanny chose to do it." She reproached Kate bitterly for breaking her promise, and so did Fanny; both saying that all would have been well if she had not done so.