When the teachers were gone, Miss Russell stepped to the window and said, softly, "Grace!"
There was no reply. An owl hooted in the distance; a bird chirped somewhere near by. That was all.
"Grace!" said the Principal again. "If you are there, I wish you would come in and let me speak to you."
Still no reply. After waiting a moment, the Principal closed the window with a sigh. On leaving the room she paused a moment to look at the photograph of a lovely young woman, in the dress of twenty years ago, which stood on her desk.
"Dear Edith!" said Miss Russell. "My first pupil! I'll keep your girl for you, Edith, if I can!"
Was Grace Wolfe outside the window when the Principal called her? Who can tell? It is certain that ten minutes after she was at the supper in Bedlam.
The tenant of Bedlam, Miss Cornelia Hatch (familiarly known as Colney Hatch, in remembrance of the famous English Insane Asylum), was not actually mad, though many of the scholars thought her so. She was a special student of natural history, botany, and zoology; she was absent-minded and forgetful to the last degree. When she came into class, she often had to be brought there, some good-natured classmate dragging her away by main force from her private experiments. If she did remember to come of her own accord, she was apt to have a half-completed articulation hanging around her neck, or a dried frog skin stuck behind her ear for safe-keeping. Her hair was generally untidy, owing to this habit of sticking things in it while she worked; you never could tell what it would be, vertebræ, or seaweed, or pine-cones, but you could safely reckon on finding something extraneous in Colney's ruffled black hair. As for her clothes, she was usually enveloped in a huge brown gingham apron, with many pockets, which held snakes, or eggs, or roots, or anything else that would not go comfortably in her hair. When the apron became too dirty (she had had two at the beginning of the term, but one had been destroyed in an explosion), Miss Carey took it away and washed it, while Colney went around looking scared and miserable in a queer flannel gown of a pinkish shade. Report said it had once been brown, but that the colour had been changed by the fumes of something or other, no one knew what. Sometimes she had buttons on frock and apron, more often not. Periodically, Miss Carey or the Owls descended upon her, and sewed on her buttons and mended her up generally; and she was very grateful, and said how nice it was to have buttons. But she soon pulled them off again, because she never had time to do anything but tear her clothes off when she went to bed, and drag them on again when she got up. When a button flew off, she pinned the place over, if a pin was in sight; if not, she went without; it made no difference to her, and she was not conscious of it in five minutes. Miss Russell, and most of the teachers, were very tender with Colney. She was poor, and meant to work her way through college; even now she paid part of her schooling by stuffing birds and setting up skeletons for one of the college professors. If she did not kill herself or somebody else before she graduated, Miss Russell looked forward to a distinguished career for the tenant of Bedlam; so, as I have said, she was tender and patient with her; and good Miss Carey mended her when she could, and saw that she remembered to eat her dinner, and Miss Boyle and Miss Mink rejoiced over her, and Miss Cortlandt led her gently through English literature, giving her Walton and Bacon and all the scientific men of letters that she could find. Only one teacher failed to do her best to smooth poor Colney's path through school; that was Miss Pugsley. Rhetoric was simply an empty noise to the girl. She never by any chance knew a lesson, and Miss Pugsley lashed her with so cruel a tongue that Peggy used to ache and smart for her as well as for herself, and would get hold of Colney's hand and hold it and squeeze it, growing red the while with pity and anger. But Colney never noticed it half as much as Peggy did; she used to look at the angry teacher for a few minutes in an abstracted kind of way, and then retire within herself and make imaginary experiments. This was what happened on the dreadful day when Miss Pugsley said:
"The subject of this sentence is I. How do we go to work to form the predicate, Miss Hatch?"
Cornelia started, but replied, instantly: