Miss Wakefield had enough sense to refuse the bait, but she flushed. "I do not feel that it is at all suitable for the mother of one of our girls to be a Militant Suffragette! The reputation of the School...." The sentence was left unfinished.
She picked up the sheets of paper. "I have here two of the mid-term examination papers in arithmetic, yours and Angela Harvey's. There is a curious, a very curious similarity between them. All the answers are correct except for problems five, seven and twelve, and they have precisely the same mistakes in both papers!" She paused and stared hard at Sarah, who blinked but refused to lower her eyes. "You and Harvey sit next to one another," Miss Wakefield said meaningly.
Sarah said nothing. She sniffed because her nose was running and there was no pocket in her games uniform for a handkerchief.
"Well?" said Miss Wakefield. "Have you nothing to say?"
"No, Miss Wakefield," Sarah said, "except I didn't copy from Angela, if that's what you mean."
"Then it would appear that she copied from you."
"That's a beastly thing to say! It was a coincidence! She's not a cheat!"
The headmistress felt on secure ground: the child was losing her temper. It was Miss Wakefield's favorite stratagem to make people lose their tempers—that is, if they were children or underlings.
"Blow your nose, Stone," she said, and then, seeing that Sarah had no handkerchief, she gave her her own, with a look of distaste. "I think perhaps you might do better at some other school."