"Where have you been, Merle?" inquired Miss Pollard in the most scholastic manner she knew how to adopt. "I forgot my history and went back for it--I'm very sorry," gasped Merle, much out of breath with running. Opal smiled, and counted over the books which she held on her lap with the air of one who is thinking to herself: "Other people don't forget their things!" Merle, by this time thoroughly cross, frowned at her darkly. There was something so aggravatingly smug about Opal; all her peccadilloes were well hidden, and never came under public and official notice. She took advantage of her position, too; for, as the girls filed out of the room, she stroked Miss Pollard's arm caressingly as she passed, a token of affection which Merle, who admired the head mistress after yesterday's tea-party, would have loved to bestow but did not dare. The pixies would not let Merle alone that morning. They jerked her pen, so that she made blots on her exercise, they whisked dates out of her memory, and put wrong figures into her sums. When it came to literature lesson they must have deliberately absconded with her copy of _Julius Caesar_. She hunted for it in vain. "I _know_ I left it in my desk yesterday," she assured Miss Fanny, who was waiting to take the class and chafing at the delay. "You ought to have your books ready. Be quick and look again. It's probably underneath something else," urged the mistress impatiently. Merle seized a top layer of textbooks and essay paper and dumped them down on the floor, the more readily to burrow deeper into the rather mixed and miscellaneous collection in her desk. "Merle Ramsay! Really, you forget yourself," chided Miss Fanny. "Pick those things up and put them back. A more disgracefully untidy performance I never saw. I won't have that litter on the floor. Is your _Julius Caesar_ there, or is it not?" Apparently it was not, for Merle turned over her heap of confusion in vain; and in her agitation let the lid of the desk fall with an awful slam that echoed through the room. She sat up scarlet in the face. "That will do!" said Miss Fanny icily. "You must look on with Mavis if you can't find your own." "Please, Miss Fanny, I saw a _Julius Caesar_ in the pound this morning," volunteered Opal demurely. "I don't know whose it is." The mistress turned to the lost-property basket, stooped down, drew out the missing book, and handed it reproachfully to Merle. "If you kept your desk in better order you wouldn't lose your things. See how you've delayed the whole form! You must bring a penny for the missionary box this afternoon." Merle sat through the lesson with a face like thunder. She was absolutely certain that she had left the book inside her desk, and she strongly suspected Opal of having deliberately taken it out and placed it in the pound. "Just like one of her disgusting tricks. She'd do anything mean. I'll have something to say to her after school," she mused gloomily.