"No, you don't do that," Rosa said solemnly; "but you do put your nose in your cup."
The colour flickered on Beth's sensitive cheek, and she shrank into herself.
"There, don't tease her!" Mary Wright, the eldest, stupidest, and most motherly girl in the school, exclaimed. "How can you drink without putting your nose in your cup, stupid?"
Then Beth saw it and smiled, greatly relieved. This venerable pleasantry was a sign that she had been taken once for all into the good graces of her schoolmates. The girls who were liked were usually nicknamed and always chaffed; the rest were treated with different degrees of politeness, the dockyard girls, as the lowest of all, being called miss, even by the teachers.
On Thursday evenings the girls in the fifth and sixth were allowed to do fancy work for an hour while a story-book was read aloud to them, either by Miss Smallwood or one of themselves when her voice was tired. The book was always either childish or dull, generally both, and Beth, who had been accustomed to Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, grew restive under the infliction. One evening when she had twice been reprimanded for yawning aggressively, she exclaimed, "Well, Miss Smallwood, it is such silly stuff! Why, I could tell you a better story myself, and make it up as I go on."
"Then begin at once and tell it," said Miss Smallwood, glancing round at the girls, who smiled derisively, thinking that Beth would have to excuse herself and thereby tacitly acknowledge that she had been boasting. To their surprise, however, Beth took the request seriously, settled herself in her chair, folded her hands, and, with her eyes roaming about the room as if she were picking up the details from the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and all it contained, started without hesitation. It was the romantic story of a haunted house on a great rocky promontory, and the freshness and sound of the sea pervaded it. The girls went on with their work for a little, but by degrees first one and then another stopped, and just sat staring at Beth, while gravity settled on every face as the interest deepened.
Suddenly the bell rang, and the story was not finished.
"Oh dear!" Miss Smallwood exclaimed, "it is very fascinating, Beth; but I really am afraid I ought not to have allowed you to tell it. I had no idea—I must speak to Miss Clifford."
The fame of this wonderful story spread through the school, and the next half-holiday the first-class girls sent to ask Beth to go to their room and repeat it; but Beth was not in the mood, and answered their messenger tragically:—
"'Twas not for this I left my father's home!
Go, tell your class, that Vashti will not come."