She walked away, leaving sad heart-burnings behind her. The Ramsays had been very simply brought up at home, and were accustomed to judge people merely by whether they liked them or not, and knew little of worldly standards. Bevis, with his jolly, merry ways, and his intense love of nature, seemed a far pleasanter companion than Gwen or her brother Tudor. Intellectually he was more than the equal of those who despised him, and his romantic story suggested many possibilities. "Bevis might be _anybody_," ventured Mavis. "I don't care who he is, he's our friend," fumed Merle stoutly. "Rather, and we'll stick to him in spite of all the Glyn Williamses in the world. It really doesn't matter to us what Gwen thinks." Fortunately for the Ramsays, Gwen only came to school twice a week, but to their sorrow Opal was there every day. Lately she had been growing more and more out of hand. She had begun to adopt a patronizing attitude towards Miss Pollard and Miss Fanny, called them "poor old dears", quizzed their clothes, their manners, and their methods of teaching, and voted them hopelessly slow and out of date. There is a certain phase in girls who are growing up at which they are fiercely critical of their elders. As a child Opal had immensely admired her two godmothers, and had been proud of their many accomplishments. Now, because she too had acquired a certain skill in music and painting, she rather looked down upon their talents. She thought her own superior, forgetting that though a well-taught girl may seem clever at sixteen, there is no guarantee that she will go on developing in the same ratio, and will therefore be a genius at the age of thirty-seven. The fact was that Opal ought long ago to have been sent away to a boarding-school, where she would have found her level among other girls of her own age, and have been thoroughly sat upon by elder ones. Her position of prime favourite at The Moorings was bad both for herself and for everybody else. The juniors, encouraged by her example, began to evade rules, and to do many things they had never dreamt of before. Miss Fanny, finding them unusually troublesome, puzzled over the reason. She decided there must be bad influence somewhere, but it never struck her to fix the blame upon Opal. She was always ready with an excuse where her god-daughter was concerned. Among other subjects which Miss Fanny taught at The Moorings was the piano. She was a very good and correct musician, and had studied under an eminent master of her day. Perhaps her fault as a teacher was that she concentrated too much on the technique to the exclusion of the artistic element. She would stop a pupil every few bars to correct errors in touch or the position of the hands, and was such a martinet over these details that the spirit of the piece was often entirely lost. Merle, who liked to dash away and get a general impression of a composition, oblivious of a few wrong notes, chafed terribly under this severe regime.