When recreation hour arrived she felt tired and headachy. The other girls now went out into the pleasant sunshine. Pauline looked after them with longing. They would sit under the overhanging trees; they would eat fruit and talk nonsense and laugh. Doubtless they would talk about her and the birthday so near at hand. At noon the schoolroom was hot, too, for the sun beat hard upon the windows, and Pauline felt more stifled and more headachy and sulky than ever.
“Oh! please,” she said, as Miss Tredgold was leaving the room, “I can’t do this horrid writing to-day. Please forgive me. Do let me go out.”
“No, Pauline; you must take your punishment. You were late this morning; you disobeyed my rules. Take the punishment which I am obliged to give you as a lady should, and make no more excuses.”
The door was shut upon the angry girl. She sat for a time absolutely still, pressing her hand to her aching brow; then she strolled across the schoolroom, fetched some paper, and sat down to her unwelcome task. She wrote very badly, and when the hour was over she had not half copied the task assigned to her. This bad beginning went on to a worse end. Pauline declined to learn any lessons in preparation hour, and accordingly next morning she was absolutely unprepared for her tasks.
Miss Tredgold was now thoroughly roused.
“I must make an example,” she said to herself. “I shall have no influence over these girls if I let them think I am all softness and yielding. The fact is, I have shown them the south side of my character too long; a little touch of the northeast will do them no harm.”
Accordingly she called the obstinate and sulky Pauline before her.
“I am very much displeased with you. You have done wrong, and you must be punished. I have told you and your sisters that there is such a place as Punishment Land. You enter it now, and live there until after breakfast to-morrow morning.”
“But what do you mean?” said Pauline.
“I mean exactly what I say. You have been for the last twenty-four hours extremely naughty. You will therefore be punished for the next twenty-four hours. You are a very naughty girl. Naughty girls must be punished, and you, Pauline, are now under punishment. You enter Punishment Land immediately.”