'Ah, you may well sigh,' retorted her principal; 'the way those girls ate veal and ham yesterday was enough to have turned the school into a hospital—and with raspberry jam tart after, too.'

Veal with ham was the Sunday dinner at Mauleverer, a banquet upon which Miss Pew prided herself, as an instance of luxurious living rarely to be met with in boarding-schools. If the girls were ill after it, that was their look out.

'There's something wrong, I can see by your face, said Miss Pew, after she had sipped half her tea and enjoyed the whole of her toast; 'is it the servants or the pupils?'

Strange to say, Miss Pew did not look grateful to the bearer of evil tidings. This was one of her idiosyncrasies. She insisted upon being kept informed of all that went wrong in her establishment, but she was apt to be out of temper with the informant.

'Neither,' answered Miss Pillby, with an awful shake of her sandy locks; 'I don't believe there is a servant in this house who would so far forget herself. And as to the pupils—'

'We know what they are,' snapped Miss Pew; 'I never heard of anything bad enough to be beyond their reach. Who is it?'

'Your clever pupil teacher, Ida Palliser.'

'Ah,' grunted Miss Pew, setting down her cup; 'I can believe anything of her. That girl was born to be troublesome. What has she done now?'

Miss Pillby related the circumstances of Miss Palliser's crime setting forth her own cleverness in the course of her narrative—how her misgivings had been excited by the unwonted familiarity between Ida and the Fräulein—a young person always open to suspicion as a stranger in the land—how her fears had been confirmed by the conduct of an unknown man in the church; and how, urged by her keen sense of duty, she had employed Mrs. Jones's boy to watch the delinquents.

'I'll make an example of her,' said Miss Pew, flinging back the bed-clothes with a tragic air as she rose from her couch. 'That will do, Pillby. I want no further details. I'll wring the rest out of that bold-faced minx in the face of all the school. You can go.'