“Ha!” she exclaimed, as she caught a faint sight of a reflection of her face, “it makes me look just like a cockatoo. I declare to goodness, too, it quite hurts me to shut my eyes, and my nostrils are both drawn up, for all the world as if I’d got under them a cup of that filthy senna and prunes that Miss Wewitz will force us to take once a month—to sweeten our blood, as she calls it, though it’s only to make us eat less. I’m sure!” As there was no bearing the torture of what Miss Chutney termed the cockatoo-style of _coiffure_, she proceeded forthwith to arrange her locks in a series of those hairy black puddings, which are known by the name of sausage curls;—this done, she threw up the window, and looked out into the gravelly and deserted playground, her arms resting on the sill. In a few minutes she began singing, or rather humming to herself thoughtlessly, the finale to “La Cenerentola,” and immediately, to her great alarm, she saw the head of the Count de Sanschemise thrust from one of the lower windows, and his face turned up towards her. Miss Chutney stopped in the middle of one of her runs, and started back from where she was standing. “Well, if that isn’t the French gentleman! and he’ll be sure to fancy I did it on purpose,” she inwardly exclaimed. “Oh, what ever will he think of me! I’d have given anything rather than it should have occurred. It will be putting such silly notions in the man’s head; making him think, I dare say, that one’s quite taken with him, and _that_ I’m sure I’m not. He’s got very fine expressive eyes of his own, certainly—but, oh dear! Frenchmen are so deceitful! His countenance is the very image of that love of a head that Miss Tatting did in crayons last ‘half.’ I wonder if he’s gone in yet.” The latter remark Miss Chutney uttered in a half whisper, as if afraid to let herself hear it; and then she crept softly back towards the window, where she stood beside the shutters, stretching herself forward by degrees, and raising herself on tiptoe, so that she might look down without thrusting her head so far out as to be visible. Unfortunately, however, just as she had got to the point of seeing the tassel of the Count’s smoking cap, she lost her balance, and, tipping suddenly forward, was thrust, head and shoulders, half out of the window. In the fright of the moment she uttered a suppressed scream, and immediately disappeared. “Gracious! gracious! and it’s impossible to let him know I didn’t mean it,” she cried;—“it must have seemed to him for all the world like as if I was calling to him. Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!? and, in the flurry of her emotions, she sat herself down on the top of the screw-press for the table-cloths, that stood in the extreme corner of the room, and hiding her face in her hands, beat a tattoo with her feet on the floor in vexation at what had happened.