When the pupils at The Moorings assembled that morning for call-over, Miss Fanny entered with a look upon her face which everybody at once mentally registered at stormy. Her "Good morning, girls!" was cold. She never noticed the vase full of flowers which the boarders had arranged upon her desk, and she took the names, as if she were reading a list of criminals, in a deep sad voice without an atom of her usual geniality. When this first preliminary was finished she turned to what was evidently the pressing business on her mind. "Girls!" she began. "A very unpleasant thing has happened in the school. The metronome is missing from the piano. None of the boarders has interfered with it. Can any of you day girls tell what has become of it?" A look of much astonishment passed round the assembled faces. On several it was even mingled with relief. To get rid of the metronome did not seem an unmixed evil. Perhaps Miss Fanny noted the expression. She paused for a whole solemn minute, then spoke again in a yet sterner voice. "I put every girl in this room on her honour to tell what she knows." There was a stir among some of the younger children, a bending together of heads, and a faint whispering like the buzzing of bees, then Betty Marshall held up her hand. "Please, Miss Fanny, there's a metronome just like ours in the pound. Posie and Florrie and I saw it as we came to school." "In the pound!" Miss Fanny's voice quivered with amazed indignation. "Yes, the Nicky Nans had taken it." "But surely no boy would dare to venture into our schoolroom. It's outrageous! I shall have to complain to the schoolmaster if they go beyond bounds like this. To take it off the piano!" Posie and Betty glanced doubtfully at one another as if uncertain whether to explain further. Then Posie held up a chubby hand. "Please, Miss Fanny, it wasn't on the piano; it was outside on the window-sill." "On the window-sill! Who put it there?" The teacher's voice had reached crescendo. Posie wriggled and looked uncomfortably at Betty and then at Florrie, finally in a rather tremulous whisper she murmured: "Merle Ramsay." Merle stood up at once with flaming cheeks. "I put the metronome outside the window for a minute, Miss Fanny, but I didn't leave it there. I put it back upon the piano." Miss Fanny glared hard, first at Merle, and then with a kind of comprehensive sweeping glance over the whole school. "Can any other girl volunteer any information?" There was dead silence. Opal was rather ostentatiously sharpening the point of her pencil. The teacher's gaze came back to a focus on Merle. "You had no business to interfere with the metronome at all. I certainly consider it your fault that it has been taken. In future I can't have you day girls staying in the schoolroom after four o'clock. You must leave directly you've put your books away. Go to your forms now, girls! We've wasted too much time already."