"How do you account for this strong circumstantial evidence against you, Ella?" asked her teacher.
"I don't know, Miss Layton, I don't know at all how they got there," said Ella, with a bewildered look. "I've been in the school-room ever since it was opened this morning, and I didn't see any body put them there."
"I believe you, Ella," said Miss Layton, "for whatever other faults you may have, I know you to be a perfectly truthful child."
"Oh yes, it's a fine thing to be the teacher's pet!" said Sallie, tossing her head. "You'd be ready enough to believe that I had done such a thing, because you don't like me."
"I should be more ready to believe it of you, than of Ella, Sallie; because, and only because, you have not established the same character for truth. I have more than once had great reason to doubt your word, but never Ella's. A teacher soon discovers whose word she can trust and whose she cannot."
"It's just because she's your favourite," said Sallie, angrily.
"Go to your seat," said Miss Layton, "I will not allow such impertinence, and shall mark you for it in your weekly report. Can any of the rest of you throw any light upon this subject?" she inquired, turning to the other scholars.
"Miss Layton," said the girl who sat next to Sallie, "I think, perhaps Sallie tore her book herself, for I heard her say yesterday, that she would tear out those leaves because she couldn't do the sums."
The girl who kept the key and attended to the room, now came up, and told Miss Layton that Sallie had come to her to borrow the key on the previous evening, saying that she had forgotten her books, and must get them, or she should not know her lessons. "Yes, and I was going after the cows," said Charley Owen, "and I saw the school door open, and I thought may-be somebody was breaking in, so I ran and looked in at the door, and I saw Sallie sitting by Ellie's desk a writing, and she tore a leaf out of a book, and wiped her pen on it, and then she looked at the book awhile, and then tore out some more leaves, and then she raised up the lid and put the ink in the desk, and I guess she put the leaves in too."