"What is it?" whispered Margaret, forgetting the dread interview before her, and her own unformed misgivings.
"She won't give me the letter. I'm to have it when I go home for good; and I'm to go home for good at the holidays," whimpered Janey.
"Poor Janey!" said Margaret, petting the blonde head on her shoulder.
"Margaret Shields, come here!" cried Miss Marlett, in a shaky voice, from the boudoir.
"Come to the back music-room when she's done with you," the other girl whispered. And Margaret marched, with a beating heart, into Miss Marlett's chamber.
"My dear Margaret!" said Miss Marlett, holding out her hands. She was standing up in the middle of the boudoir. She ought to have been sitting grimly, fortified behind her bureau; that was the position in which she generally received pupils on these gloomy occasions.
"My dear Margaret!" she repeated. The girl trembled a little as the school-mistress drew her closer, and made her sit down on a sofa.
"What has happened?" she asked. Her lips were so dry that she could scarcely speak.
"You must make up your mind to be very brave. Your father----"
"Was it an accident?" asked Margaret, suddenly. She knew pretty well what was coming. Often she had foreseen the end, which it needed no prophet to foretell. "Was it anything very dreadful?"
"Mr. Maitland does not say. You are to be called for to-day. Poor Daisy!"
"Oh, Miss Marlett, I am so very unhappy!" the girl sobbed. Somehow she was kneeling now, with her head buried in the elder lady's lap. "I have been horrid to you. I am so wretched!"
A little kindness and a sudden trouble had broken down Miss Margaret Shields. For years she had been living, like Dr. Johnson at college, with a sad and hungry heart, trying to "carry it off by her wild talk and her wit." "It was bitterness they mistook for frolic." She had known herself to be a kind of outcast, and she determined to hold her own with the other girls who had homes and went to them in the holidays. Margaret had not gone home for a year. She had learned much, working harder than they knew; she had been in the "best set" among the pupils, by dint of her cheery rebelliousness. Now she suddenly felt all her loneliness, and knew, too, that she had been living, socially, in that little society at the expense of this kind queer old Miss Marlett's feelings.